Professional Ethics in Engineering

Collection Editor:
William Frey
3 AUDIOBOOK COLLECTIONS

6 BOOK COLLECTIONS
Professional Ethics in Engineering

Collection Editor:
William Frey
Authors:
Jose A. Cruz-Cruz
William Frey

Online:
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CONNEXIONS

Rice University, Houston, Texas

This selection and arrangement of content as a collection is copyrighted by William Frey. It is licensed under the
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Collection structure revised: August 29, 2013
PDF generated: November 18, 2013
For copyright and attribution information for the modules contained in this collection, see p. 119.
 Table of Contents
1 Ethical Theory and Group Work
1.1 Theory Building Activities: Mountain Terrorist Exercise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Ethics of Teamwork . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.3 Moral Exemplars in Business and Professional Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.4 Theory-Building Activities: Virtue Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2 Decision Making in the Professional Context
2.1 Theory-Building Activities: Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.2 Three Frameworks for Ethical Decision Making and Good Computing Reports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.3 Socio-Technical Systems in Professional Decision Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.4 Ethical Decision Making in Engineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
2.5 Gray Matters for the Hughes Aircraft Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3 Professional Codes of Ethics
3.1 Pirate Code for Engineering Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
4 Engineering Ethics Bowl
4.1 Ethics Bowl Rules and Procedures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
4.2 Ethics Bowl: Cases and Score Sheets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
4.3 Practical and Professional Ethics Bowl Activity: Follow-Up In-Depth Case Anal-
ysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
5 Assessment and Logistics
5.1 Rubrics for Exams and Group Projects in Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
5.2 Realizing Responsibility Through Class Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
5.3 Computer and Engineering Ethics Muddiest Point Module . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
Attributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .119
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Chapter 1

Ethical Theory and Group Work

1
1.1 Theory Building Activities: Mountain Terrorist Exercise

1.1.1 Module Introduction

This module poses an ethical dilemma, that is, a forced choice between two bad alternatives. Your job is to
read the scenario and choose between the two horns of the dilemma. You will make your choice and then
justify it in the rst activity. In the second activity, you will discuss your choice with others. Here, the
objective is to reach consensus on a course of action or describe the point at which your group's progress
toward consensus stopped. The Mountain Terrorist Exercise almost always generates lively discussion and
helps us to reect on of our moral beliefs. Don't expect to reach agreement with your fellow classmates
quickly or eortlessly. (If you do, then your instructor will nd ways of throwing a monkey wrench into the
whole process.) What is more important here is that we learn how to state our positions clearly, how to
listen to others, how to justify our positions, and how to assess the justications oered by others. In other
words, we will all have a chance to practice the virtue of reasonableness. And we will learn reasonableness
not when it's easy (as it is when we agree) but when it becomes dicult (as it is when we disagree).
The second half of this module requires that you reect carefully on your moral reasoning and that of
your classmates. The Mountain Terrorist Exercise triggers the dierent moral schemas that make up our
psychological capacity for moral judgment. Choosing one horn of the dilemma means that you tend to favor
one kind of schema while choosing the other horn generally indicates that your favor another. The dominant
moral theories that we will study this semester provide detailed articulations and justications of these moral
schemas. Reecting on your choice, the reasons for your choice, and how your choice diers from that of
your classmates will help you get started on the path of studying and eectively utilizing moral theory.
The following scenario comes originally from the philosopher, Bernard Williams. It is also presented in
introductory ethics textbooks (such as Georey Thomas' An Introduction to Ethics). The rst time this
module's author became aware of its use in the classroom was in a workshop on Agriculture Ethics led by
Paul Thompson, then of Texas A&M University, in 1992.

1.1.2 Moral Theories Highlighted

1. Utilitarianism: the moral value of an action lies in its consequences or results
2. Deontology: the moral value of an action lies, not in its consequences, but in the formal characteristics
of the action itself.
3. Virtue Ethics: Actions sort themselves out into virtuous or vicious actions. Virtuous actions stem from
a virtuous character while vicious actions stem from a vicious or morally awed character. Who we
are is reveals through what we do.

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2 CHAPTER 1. ETHICAL THEORY AND GROUP WORK

1.1.3 Mountain Terrorist Scenario

You are in a remote mountain village. A group of terrorists has lined up 20 people from the village; they
plan on shooting them for collaborating with the enemy. Since you are not from the village, you will not be
killed. Taking advantage of your position, you plead with the terrorists not to carry out their plan. Finally,
you convince the leader that it is not necessary to kill all 20. He takes a gun, empties it of all its bullets
except one, and then hands it to you. He has decided to kill only one villager to set an example to the rest.
As an honored guest and outsider, you will decide who will be killed, and you will carry out the deed. The
terrorists conclude with a warning; if you refuse to kill the villager, then they will revert back to the original
plan of killing all 20. And if you try any funny business, they will kill the 20 villagers and then kill you.
What should you do?
Your Options

1. Take the gun, select a villager, and kill him or her.

2. Refuse the terrorists' oer and walk away from the situation.
Spanish Translation by Dr. Halley Sanchez
El Terrorista de la Montaña Tú eres un antropólogo que por un mes ha estado viviendo con y observando (o
sea, estudiando) a los residents de una aldea en una area remota montañoza de un pais en América Latina.
El día que te dispone irte de la aldea, aprece un grupo de hombres armados que reúnen a los aldeanos y
les anuncian que se han enterado de que ellos han estado cooperando con el gobierno represivo y que, como
lección, han de ejecutar viente de ellos. El líder de los terroristas te mira y te dice que tú te puedes ir,
ya que no estás involucardo en la lucha patriótica y que ellos no están en la costumbre de tomar rehénes
extranjeros. Debido a que te da la impresión de que el líder de los supuestos patriótas (terroristas?) es un
hombre educado, tú te atreves tratar de razonar con él. Le explica que llevas un mes en la aldea y que los
aldeanos no han cooperado de forma volutaria con el gobierno. Sí, por supuesto, las tropas del gobierno
pasaron por la aldea y conscaron algunas provisiones, pero los aldeanos no se las dieron libremente sino que
estaban indefenso y no podieron prevenir que le conscaran las mismas. El líder piensa un tiempo y te dice
que por tú ser forastero y obviamente un antropólogo estudioso, te va a dar el benicio de la duda, y que por
tanto no van a ejecutar viente aldeanos. Pero dado que la lucha patriótica está en un proceso crítico y que
la aldea sí le proveyó provisiones al gobierno, por el bien de la lucha patriótica y el bien de la humanidad,
es menester darle una lección a la aldea. Así que tan sólo han de ejecutar un aldeano. Más, como huesped,
tú has de escoger quién ha de morir y tú has de matarlo tú mismo. Te da una pistola con una sola bala y te
dice que proceda, mientras que a la vez te advierte que de tratar algo heroico, te ejecutarán inmediatamente
y procederán a ejecutar a los viente aldeanos como dijeron al comienzo. Tú eres el antropólogo. ¾Qué harás?
Activity 1
In a short essay of 1 to 2 pages describe what you would do if you were in the position of the tourist. Then
justify your choice.
Activity 2
Bring your essay to class. You will be divided into small groups. Present your choice and justication to
the others in your group. Then listen to their choices and justications. Try to reach a group consensus on
choice and justication. (You will be given 10-15 minutes.) If you succeed present your results to the rest of
the class. If you fail, present to the class the disagreement that blocked consensus and what you did (within
the time limit) to overcome it.

1.1.4 Taxonomy of Ethical Approaches

There are many ethical approaches that can be used in decision making. The Mountain Terrorist Exercise
is based on an articial scenario designed to separate these theoretical approaches along the lines of the
dierent "horns" of a dilemma. Utilitarians tend to choose to shoot a villager "in order to save 19." In other
words they focus their analysis on the consequences of an action alternative and choose the one that produces
the least harm. Deontologists generally elect to walk away from the situation. This is because they judge an
action on the basis of its formal characteristics. A deontologist might argue that killing the villager violates

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natural law or cannot be made into a law or rule that consistently applies to everybody. A deontologist
might say something like, "What right do I have to take another person's life?" A virtue ethicists might try
to imagine how a person with the virtue of courage or integrity would act in this situaiton. (Williams claims
that choosing to kill the villager, a duty under utilitarianism, would undermine the integrity of a person who
abhorred killing.)
Table Connecting Theory to Domain

1. Row 1: Utilitarianism concerns itself with the domain of consequences which tells us that the moral
value of an action is "colored" by its results. The harm/benecence test, which asks us to choose the
least harmful alternative, encapsulates or summarizes this theoretical approach. The basic principle
of utilitarianism is the principle of utility: choose that action that produces the greatest good for the
greatest number. Cost/benets analysis, the Pareto criterion, the Kalder/Hicks criterion, risk/benets
analysis all represent dierent frameworks for balancing positive and negative consequences under
utilitarianism or consequentialism.
2. Row 2: Deontology helps us to identify and justify rights and their correlative duties The reversibility
test summarizes deontology by asking the question, "Does your action still work if you switch (=reverse)
roles with those on the receiving end? "Treat others always as ends, never merely as means," the
Formula of End, represents deontology's basic principle. The rights that represent special cases of
treating people as ends and not merely as means include (a) informed consent, (b) privacy, (c) due
process, (d) property, (e) free speech, and (f) conscientious objection.
3. Row 3: Virtue ethics turns away from the action and focuses on the agent, the person performing the
action. The word, "Virtue," refers to dierent sets of skills and habits cultivated by agents. These skills
and habits, consistently and widely performed, support, sustain, and advance dierent occupational,
social, and professional practices. (See MacIntyre, After Virtue, and Solomon, Ethics and Excellence,
for more on the relation of virtues to practices.) The public identication test summarizes this ap-
proach: an action is morally acceptable if it is one with which I would willingly be publicly associated
given my moral convictions. Individual virtues that we will use this semester include integrity, justice,
responsibility, reasonableness, honesty, trustworthiness, and loyalty.

Covering All the Bases

Ethical Dimension Covering Ethical Encapsulating Basic Principles Application or
Approach Ethical Test Bridging Tools
Consequences Utilitarianism Harm/Benecence Principle of Util- Benet & cost
(weigh harms ity: greatest good comparisonUtility
against benets) for greatest num- Maximization
ber
Formal Character- Deontology (Duty- Reversibility (test Categorical Im- Free & Informed
istics of Act based, rights- by reversing roles perativeFormula Consent, Privacy,
based, natural between agent and of EndAutonomy Property, Due
law, social con- object of action) Process, Free
tract) Speech, Conscien-
tious objection
continued on next page

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4 CHAPTER 1. ETHICAL THEORY AND GROUP WORK

Skills and habits Virtue Ethics Public Identica- Virtues are means Integrity, justice,
cultivated by tion (impute moral between extremes responsibility, rea-
agent import of action to with regard to sonableness, hon-
person of agent) agent and ac- esty, trustworthi-
tionVirtues are ness, loyalty
cultivated disposi-
tions that promote
central community
values

Table 1.1

1.1.5 Comments on the Relation Between Ethical Approaches

The Mountain Terrorist Exercise has, in the past, given students the erroneous idea that ethical approaches
are necessarily opposed to one another. As one student put it, "If deontology tells us to walk away from
the village, then utilitarianism must tell us to stay and kill a villager because deontology and utilitarian-
ism, as dierent and opposed theories, always reach dierent and opposed conclusions on the actions they
recommend." The Mountain Terrorist dilemma was specially constructed by Bernard Williams to produce
a situation that oered only a limited number of alternatives. He then tied these alternatives to dierent
ethical approaches to separate them precisely because in most real world situations they are not so readily
distinguishable. Later this semester, we will turn from these philosophical puzzles to real world cases where
ethical approaches function in a very dierent and mostly complimentary way. As we will see, ethical ap-
proaches, for the most part, converge on the same solutions. For this reason, this module concludes with 3
meta-tests. When approaches converge on a solution, this strengthens the solution's moral validity. When
approaches diverge on a solution, this weakens their moral validity. A third meta-test tells us to avoid fram-
ing all ethical problems as dilemmas (=forced choices between undesirable alternatives) or what Carolyn
Whitbeck calls "multiple-choice" problems. You will soon learn that eective moral problem solving requires
moral imagination and moral creativity. We do not "nd" solutions "out there" ready made but design them
to harmonize and realize ethical and practical values.
Meta-Tests

• Divergence Test: When two ethical approaches dier on a given solution, then that dierence counts
against the strength of the solution. Solutions on which ethical theories diverge must be revised towards
convergence.
• Convergence Test: Convergence represents a meta-test that attests to solution strength. Solutions on
which dierent theoretical approaches converge are, by this fact, strengthened. Convergence demon-
strates that a solution is strong, not just over one domain, but over multiple domains.
• Avoid Framing a Problem as a Dilemma. A dilemma is a no-win situation that oers only two al-
ternatives of action both of which are equally bad. (A trilemma oers three bad alternatives, etc.)
Dilemmas are better dissolved than solved. Reframe the dilemma into something that admits of more
than two no-win alternatives. Dilemma framing (framing a situation as an ethical dilemma) discour-
ages us from designing creative solutions that integrate the conicting values that the dilemma poses
as incompatible.

1.1.6 Module Wrap-Up

1. Reasonableness and the Mountain Terrorist Exercise. It may seem that this scenario is the last
place where the virtue of reasonableness should prevail, but look back on how you responded to those
of your classmates who chose dierently in this exercise and who oered arguments that you had not
initially thought of. Did you "listen and respond thoughtfully" to them? Were you "open to new ideas"

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even if these challenged your own? Did you "give reasons for" your views, modifying and shaping them
to respond to your classmates' arguments? Did you "acknowledge mistakes and misunderstandings"
such as responding critically and personally to a classmate who put forth a dierent view? Finally, when
you turned to working with your group, were you able to "compromise (without compromising personal
integrity)"? If you did any or all of these things, then you practiced the virtue of reasonableness as
characterized by Michael Pritchard in his book, Reasonable Children: Moral Education and Moral
Learning (1996, University of Kansas Press, p. 11). Congratulate yourself on exercising reasonableness
in an exercise designed to challenge this virtue. You passed the test.
2. Recognizing that we are already making ethical arguments. In the past, students have made
the following arguments on this exercise: (a) I would take the gun and kill a villager in order to
save nineteen; (b) I would walk away because I don't have the right to take another's life; (c) While
walking away might appear cowardly it is the responsible thing to do because staying and killing a
villager would make me complicit in the terrorists' project. As we discussed in class, these and other
arguments make use of modes of thought captured by ethical theories or approaches. The rst employs
the consequentialist approach of utilitarianism while the second makes use of the principle of respect
that forms the basis of our rights and duties. The third works through a conict between two virtues,
courage and responsibility. This relies on the virtue approach. One accomplishment of this exercise
is to make you aware of the fact that you are already using ethical arguments, i.e., arguments that
appeal to ethical theory. Learning about the theories behind these arguments will help you to makes
these arguments more eectively.
3. Results from Muddy Point Exercises The Muddy Point Exercises you contributed kept coming
back to two points. (a) Many of you pointed out that you needed more information to make a decision
in this situation. For example, who were these terrorists, what causes were they ghting for, and were
they correct in accusing the village of collaborating with the enemy? Your request for more information
was quite appropriate. But many of the cases we will be studying this semester require decisions in the
face of uncertainty and ignorance. These are unavoidable in some situations because of factors such as
the cost and time of gathering more information. Moral imagination skillfully exercised can do a lot
to compensate when all of the facts are not in. (b) Second, many of you felt overly constrained by the
dilemma framing of the scenario. Those of you who entered the realm of "funny business" (anything
beyond the two alternatives of killing the villager or walking away) took a big step toward eective
moral problem solving. By rejecting the dilemma framing of this scenario, you were trying to reframe
the situation to allow for moreand more ethically viablealternatives. Trying to negotiate with the
Terrorists is a good example of reframing the scenario to admit of more ethical alternatives of action
than killing or walking away.
4. Congratulations on completing your rst ethics module! You have begun recognizing and practicing
skills that will help you to tackle real life ethical problems. (Notice that we are going to work with
"problems" not "dilemmas".) We will now turn, in the next module, to look at those who managed
to do good in the face of diculty. Studying moral exemplars will provide the necessary corrective to
the "no-win" Mountain Terrorist Exercise.

2
1.2 Ethics of Teamwork

• Ethics of Team Work

• William J. Frey (working with material developed by Chuck Hu at St. Olaf College
• Centro de la Etica en las Profesiones
• University of Puerto Rico - Mayaguez

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6 CHAPTER 1. ETHICAL THEORY AND GROUP WORK

1.2.1 Module Introduction

Much of your future work will be organized around group or team activities. This module is designed to
prepare you for this by getting you to reect on ethical and practical problems that arise in small groups like
work teams. Four issues, based on well-known ethical values, are especially important. How do groups achieve
justice (in the distribution of work), responsibility (in specifying tasks, assigning blame, and awarding credit),
reasonableness (ensuring participation, resolving conict, and reaching consensus), and honesty (avoiding
deception, corruption, and impropriety)? This module asks that you develop plans for realizing these moral
values in your group work this semester. Furthermore, you are provided with a list of some of the more
common pitfalls of group work and then asked to devise strategies for avoiding them. Finally, at the end of
the semester, you will review your goals and strategies, reect on your successes and problems, and carry
out an overall assessment of the experience.

1.2.2 Module Activities

1. Groups are provided with key ethical values that they describe and seek to realize thorugh group
activity.
2. Groups also study various obstacles that arise in collective activity: the Abilene Paradox, Groupthink,
and Group Polarization.
3. Groups prepare initial reports consisting of plans for realizing key values in their collective activity.
They also develop strategies for avoiding associated obstacles.
4. At the end of the semester, groups prepare a self-evaluation that assesses success in realizing ethical
values and avoiding obstacles.
5. Textboxes in this module describe pitfalls in groups activities and oer general strategies for preventing
or mitigating them. There is also a textbox that provides an introductory orientation on key ethical
values or virtues.

1.2.3 A Framework for Value-Integration

The objective of this module is to teach you to teach yourselves how to work in small groups. You will
develop and test procedures for realizing value goals and avoiding group pitfalls. You will also use Socio-
Technical System Analysis to help you understand better how to take advantage of the way in which dierent
environments enable groups activities and to anticipate and minimize the way in which other environments
can constrain or even oppose group activities.

• Discovery: "The goal of this activity is to 'discover' the values that are relevant to, inspire, or inform
a given design project, resulting in a list of values and bringing into focus what is often implicit in a
design project." [Flanagan et al. 323]. Discovery of group values is a trial and error process. To get
started, use the ADEM Statement of Values or the short value proles listed below.
• Translation: "[T]ranslation is the activity of embodying or expressing...values in a system design.
Translation is further divided into operationalization, which involves dening or articulating values in
concrete terms, and implementation which involves specifying corresponding design features" [Flanagan
et al., 338]. You will operationalize your values by developing proles. (See below or the ADEM
Statement of Values for examples.) Then you will implement your values by developing realization
procedures. For example, to realize justice in carrying out a group task, rst we will discuss the task
as a group, second we will divide it into equal parts, third, forth, etc.
• Verication: "In the activity of verication, designers assess to what extent they have successfully
implemented target values in a given system. [Strategies and methods] may include internal testing
among the design team, user testing in controlled environments, formal and informal interviews and
surveys, the use of prototypes, traditional quality assurance measures such as automated and regression-
oriented testing and more" [Flanagan et al., 344-5]. You will document your procedures in the face of

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dierent obstacles that may arise in your eorts at value-realization. At the end of your semester, you
will verify your results by showing how you have rened procedures to more eectively realize values.

The framework on value realization and the above-quoted passages can be found in the following resource:
M. Flanagan, D. Howe, and H. Nissenbaum, Embodying Values in Technology: Theory and Practice,
in Information Technology and Moral Philosophy, Jeroen van den Hoven and John Weckert, Eds.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 322-353.

1.2.4 Value Proles for Professional Ethics

1. Denition - A value "refers to a claim about what is worthwhile, what is good. A value is a single word
or phrase that identies something as being desirable for human beings." Brincat and Wike, Morality
and the Professional Life: Values at Work
2. Reasonableness - Defusing disagreement and resolving conicts through integration. Characteristics
include seeking relevant information, listening and responding thoughtfully to others, being open to
new ideas, giving reasons for views held, and acknowledging mistakes and misunderstandings. (From
Michael Pritchard, Reasonable Children)
3. Responsibility - The ability to develop moral responses appropriate to the moral issues and problems
that arise in one's day-to-day experience. Characteristics include avoiding blame shifting, designing
overlapping role reponsibilities to ll responsibility "gaps", expanding the scope and depth of general
and situation-specic knowledge, and working to expand control and power.
4. Respect - Recognizing and working not to circumvent the capacity of autonomy in each individual.
Characteristics include honoring rights such as privacy, property, free speech, due process, and par-
ticipatory rights such as informed consent. Disrespect circumvents autonomy by deception, force, or
manipulation.
5. Justice - Giving each his or her due. Justice breaks down into kinds such as distributive (dividing
benets and burdens fairly), retributive (fair and impartial administration of punishments), adminis-
trative (fair and impartial administration of rules), and compensatory (how to fairly recompense those
who have been wrongfully harmed by others).
6. Trust - According to Solomon, trust is the expectation of moral behavior from others.
7. Honesty - Truthfulness as a mean between too much honesty (bluntness which harms) and dishonesty
(deceptiveness, misleading acts, and mendaciousness).
8. Integrity - A meta-value that refers to the relation between particular values. These values are inte-
grated with one another to form a coherent, cohesive and smoothly functioning whole. This resembles
Solomon's account of the virtue of integrity.

1.2.5 Exercise 1: Developing Strategies for Value Realization

Directions

1. Identify value goals. Start with two or three. You can add or subtract from these as the semester
progresses.
2. Give a brief description of each using terms that reect your group's shared understandings. You may
use the descriptions in this module or those in the ADEM Statement of Values but feel free to modify
these to t your group's context. You could also add characteristics and sample rules and aspirations.
3. For each value goal, identify and spell out a procedure for realizing it. See the examples just below for
questions that can help you develop value procedures for values like justice and responsibility.

Examples

• Design a plan for realizing key moral values of team work. Your plan should address the following
value-based tasks

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8 CHAPTER 1. ETHICAL THEORY AND GROUP WORK

• How does your group plan on realizing justice? For example, how will you assign tasks within the
group that represent a fair distribution of the work load and, at the same time, recognize dierences
in individual strengths and weaknesses? How does your group plan on dealing with members who fail
to do their fair share?
• How does your group plan on realizing responsibility? For example, what are the responsibilities that
members will take on in the context of collective work? Who will be the leader? Who will play devil's
advocate to avoid groupthink? Who will be the spokesperson for the group? How does your group
plan to make clear to each individual his or her task or role responsibilities?
• How does your group plan on implementing the value of reasonableness? How will you guarantee
that each individual participates fully in group decisions and activities? How will you deal with the
dierences, non-agreements, and disagreements that arise within the group? What process will your
group use to reach agreement? How will your group insure that every individual has input, that each
opinion will be heard and considered, and that each individual will be respected?
• How does your group plan on implementing the value of (academic) honesty? For example, how will
you avoid cheating or plagiarism? How will you detect plagiarism from group members, and how will
you respond to it?
• Note: Use your imagination here and be specic on how you plan to realize each value. Think preven-
tively (how you plan on avoiding injustice, irresponsibility, injustice, and dishonesty) and proactively
(how you can enhance these values). Don't be afraid to outline specic commitments. Expect some of
your commitments to need reformulation. At the end of the semester, this will help you write the nal
report. Describe what worked, what did not work, and what you did to x the latter.

1.2.6 Obstacles to Group Work (Developed by Chuck Hu for Good Computing:
A Virtue Approach to Computer Ethics)
1. The Abilene Paradox. "The story involves a family who would all rather have been at home that
ends up having a bad dinner in a lousy restaurant in Abilene, Texas. Each believes the others want
to go to Abilene and never questions this by giving their own view that doing so is a bad idea. In
the Abilene paradox, the group winds up doing something that no individual wants to do because of a
breakdown of intra-group communication." (From Hu, Good Computing, an unpublished manuscript
for a textbook in computer ethics. See materials from Janis; complete reference below.)
2. Groupthink. The tendency for very cohesive groups with strong leaders to disregard and defend
against information that goes against their plans and beliefs. The group collectively and the members
individually remain loyal to the party line while happily marching o the cli, all the while blaming
them (i.e., outsiders) for the height and situation of the cli. (Also from Hu, Good Computing,
an unpublished manuscript for a textbook in computer ethics.)
3. Group Polarization. Here, individuals within the group choose to frame their dierences as dis-
agreements. Framing a dierence as non-agreement leaves open the possibility of working toward
agreement by integrating the dierences or by developing a more comprehensive standpoint that di-
alectally synthesizes the dierences. Framing a dierence as disagreement makes it a zero sum game;
one's particular side is good, all the others bad, and the only resolution is for the good (one's own posi-
tion) to win out over the bad (everything else). (Weston provides a nice account of group polarization
in Practical Companion to Ethics. This is not to be confused with Cass Sunstein's dierent account
of group polarization in Infotopia.)
4. Note: All of these are instances of a social psychological phenomenon called conformity. But there
are other processes at work too, like group identication, self-serving biases, self-esteem enhancement,
self-fullling prophecies, etc.

More Obstacles to Group Work

• Free Riders: Free riders are individuals who attempt to "ride for free" on the work of the other

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 9

members of the group. Some free riders cynically pursue their selsh agenda while others fall into this
pitfall because they are unable to meet all their obligations. (See conict of eort.)
• Outliers: These are often mistaken for free riders. Outliers want to become participants but fail to
become fully integrated into the group. This could be because they are shy and need encouragement
from the other group members. It could also be because the other group members know one another
well and have habitual modes of interaction that exclude outsiders. One sign of outliers; they do
not participate in group social activities but they still make substantial contributions working by
themselves. ("No, I can't come to the meetingjust tell me what I have to do.")
• Hidden Agendas: Cass Sunstein introduces this term. A group member with a "hidden agenda"
has something he or she wants to contribute but, for some reason or other, hold back. For example,
this individual may have tried to contribute something in the past and was "shot down" by the group
leader. The next time he or she will think, "Let them gure it out without me."
• Conict of Eort: conict of Eort often causes an individual to become a free rider or an outlier.
These group members have made too many commitments and come unraveled when they all come
due at the same time. Students are often overly optimistic when making out their semester schedules.
They tightly couple work and class schedules while integrating home responsibilities. Everything goes
well as long as nothing unusual happens. But if a coworker gets sick and your supervisor asks you to
come in during class times to help out, or you get sick, it becomes impossible to keep the problem
from "spilling out" into other areas of your schedule and bringing down the whole edice. Developing
a schedule with periods of slack and exibility can go a long way toward avoiding conict of eort.
Groups can deal with this by being supportive and exible. (But it is important to draw the line
between being supportive and carrying a free rider.)

Best Practices for Avoiding Abilene Paradox

• At the end of the solution generating process, carry out an anonymous survey asking participants if
anything was left out they were reluctant to put before group.
• Designate a Devil's Advocate charged with criticizing the group's decision.
• Ask participants to rearm group decisionperhaps anonymously.

Best Practices for Avoiding Groupthink (Taken from Janis, 262-271)

• "The leader of a policy-forming group should assign the role of critical evaluator to each member,
encouraging the group to give high priority to airing objections and doubts."
• "The leaders in an organization's hierarchy, when assigning a policy-planning mission to a group, should
be impartial instead of stating preferences and expectations at the outset."
• "Throughout the period when the feasibility and eectiveness of policy alternatives are being sur-
veyed, the policy-making group should from time to time divide into two or more subgroups to meet
separately...."
• One or more outside experts or qualied colleagues within the organization who are not core members
of the policy-making group should be invited to each meeting ...and should be encouraged to challenge
the views of the core members."
• "At every meeting devoted to evaluating policy alternatives, at least one member should be assigned
the role of devil's advocate."

Best Practices for Avoiding Polarizatoin (Items taken from "Good Computing: A Virtue
Approach to Computer Ethics" by Chuck Hu, William Frey and Jose Cruz (Unpublished
Manuscript)

• Set Quotas. When brainstorming, set a quota and postpone criticism until after quota has been met.
• Negotiate Interests, not Positions. Since it is usually easier to integrate basic interests than
specic positions, try to frame the problem in terms of interests.
• Expanding the Pie. Concts that arise from situational constraints can be resolved by pushing back
those constraints through negotiation or innovation..

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10 CHAPTER 1. ETHICAL THEORY AND GROUP WORK

• Nonspecic Compensation. One side makes a concession to the other but is compensated for that
concession by some other coin.
• Logrolling. Each party lowers their aspirations on items that are of less interest to them, thus trading
o a concession on a less important item for a concession from the other on a more important item.
• Cost-Cutting. One party makes an agreement to reduce its aspirations on a particular thing, and the
other party agrees to compensate the party for the specic costs that reduction in aspirations involves.
• Bridging. Finding a higher order interest on which both parties agree, and then constructing a
solution that serves that agreed-upon interest.

1.2.7 Exercise 2 - Avoiding the Pitfalls of Group Work

• Design a plan for avoiding the pitfalls of group work enumerated in the textbox above.
• How does your group plan on avoiding the Abilene Paradox?
• How does your group plan on avoiding Group Polarization?
• How does your group plan on avoiding Groupthink?
• Note: Use imagination and creativity here. Think of specic scenarios where these obstacles may arise,
and what your group can do to prevent them or minimize their impact.

1.2.8 Exercise 3: Socio Technical System

Your group work this semester will take place within a group of nested or overlapping environments. Taken
separately and together, these will structure and channel your activity, facilitating action in certain cir-
cumstances while constraining, hindering, or blocking it in others. Prepare a socio-technical system table
for your group to help structure your group self-evaluation. Include hardware/software, physical surround-
ings, stakeholders (other groups, teacher, other classes, etc.), procedures (realizing values, avoiding pitfalls),
university regulations (attendance), and information structures (collecting, sharing, disseminating)
Some things about Socio-Technical Systems

1. Socio-Technical System Analysis provides a tool to uncover the dierent environments in which business
activity takes place and to articulate how these constrain and enable dierent business practices.
2. A socio-technical system can be divided into dierent components such as hardware, software, physical
surroundings, people/groups/roles, procedures, laws/statutes/regulations, and information systems.
3. But while these dierent components can be distinguished, they are in the nal analysis inseparable.
STSs are, rst and foremost, systems composed of interrelated and interacting parts.
4. STSs also embody values such as moral values (justice, responsibility, respect, trust, integrity) and
non-moral values (eciency, satisfaction, productivity, eectiveness, and protability). These values
can be located in one or more of the system components. They come into conict with one another
causing the system to change.
5. STSs change and this change traces out a path or trajectory. The normative challenge of STS analysis
is to nd the trajectory of STS change and work to make it as value-realizing as possible.

Socio-Technical System Table for Groups

Hardware/Software
Physical Sur- Stakeholders Procedures University Information
roundings Regulations Structures
continued on next page

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 11

Think about How does the Think about Name but What are There is a
the new role classroom and other teachers, don't describe university reg- wealth of in-
for your smart the arrange- classes, super- in detail, the ulations that formation and
phones in ment of objects visors, jobs, value-realizing will have an skill locked
group work within it con- and other in- procedures impact on your in each of
in class. Will strain and dividuals that your group is group work. your group's
you be using enable group can have an adopting. For example, members. How
Google Docs activities? impact on your switches be- will you un-
to exchange ability to carry tween MWF leash these
documents? out group and TTH and telescope
assignments. schedules. them into
group work
and activities?
How, in other
words, will you
work to max-
imize group
synergies
and mini-
mize group
disadvantages?
Table 1.2

Exercises 1-3 compose the Preliminary Self-Evaluation which is due shortly after semester-
long groups are formed. Exercise 4 is the close-out group self evaluation which is due at the
end of the semester.

1.2.9 Exercise 4: Prepare a Final, Group Self-Evaluation

• Due Date: One week after the last class of the semester when your group turns in all its materials.
• Length: A minimum of ve pages not including Team Member Evaluation Forms
• Contents:
• 1. Restate the Ethical and Practical Goals that your group developed at the beginning of its formation.
• 2. Provide a careful, documented assessment of your group's success in meeting these goals. (Don't
just assert that Our group successfully realized justice in all its activities this semester. How did
your group characterize justice in the context of its work? What specic activities did the group carry
out to realize this value? What, among these activities, worked and what did not work?)
• 3. Identify obstacles, shortcomings or failures that you group experienced during the semester. How
did these arise? Why did they arise? How did you respond to them? Did your response work? What
did you learn from this experience?
• 4. Assess the plans you set forth in your initial report on how you intended to realize values and avoid
pitfalls. How did these work? Did you stick to your plans or did you nd it necessary to change or
abandon them in the face of challenges?
• 5. Discuss your group's procedures and practices? How did you divide and allocate work tasks? How
did you reach consensus on dicult issues? How did you ensure that all members were respected and
allowed signicant and meaningful participation? What worked and what did not work with respect
to these procedures? Will you repeat them in the future? Would you recommend these procedures as
best practices to future groups?
• 6. What did you learn from your experience working as a team this semester? What will require
further reection and thought? In other words, conclude your self-evaluation with a statement that
summarizes your experience working together as a team this semester.

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12 CHAPTER 1. ETHICAL THEORY AND GROUP WORK

1.2.10 Wrap Up: Some further points to consider...

1. Don't gloss over your work with generalizations like, Our group was successful and achieved all of its
ethical and practical goals this semester. Provide evidence for success claims. Detail the procedures
designed by your group to bring about these results. Are they best practices? What makes them
best practices?
2. Sometimesespecially if diculties aroseit is dicult to reect on your group's activities for the
semester. Make the eort. Schedule a meeting after the end of the semester to nalize this reection.
If things worked well, what can you do to repeat these successes in the future? If things didn't work
out, what can you do to avoid similar problems in the future? Be honest, be descriptive and avoid
blame language.
3. This may sound harsh but get used to it. Self-evaluationsgroup and individualare an integral part
of professional life. They are not easy to carry out, but properly done they help to secure success and
avoid future problems.
4. Student groupsperhaps yoursoften have problems. This self-evaluation exercise is designed to help
you face them rather than push them aside. Look at your goals. Look at the strategies you set forth for
avoiding Abilene, groupthink, and group polarization. Can you modify them to deal with problems?
Do you need to design new procedures?

1.2.11 Ethics of Team Work Presentations

Values in Team Work (Thought Experiments)
[Media Object]3
Pitfalls to Avoid in Group Work
[Media Object]4
Thought Experiments on Group Work
[Media Object]5
Team Member Evaluation Forms (Required)
[Media Object]6
New Ethics of Teamwork Presentation (Spring 2012)
[Media Object]7
1.2.12 Ethics of Teamwork Jeopardy
[Media Object]8
1.2.13 Bibliography
1. Weston, A. (2002). A Practical Companion to Ethics: 2nd Edition. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press
2. Flores, F. and Solomon, R. (2003). Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships and
Life. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
3 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<Ethics of Team Work.pptx>
4 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<Pitfalls to Avoid in Group Work.pptx>
5 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<Thought Experiments on Group Work.docx>
6 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<TEAM MEMBER RATING SHEET-3.docx>
7 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<Ethics of Teamwork.pptx>
8 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<Team_Jeopardy.pptx>

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 13

3. Brincat, Cynthia A. and Wike, Victoria S. (2000) Morality and the Professional Life: Values at
Work. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
4. Urban Walker, M. (2006). Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations After Wrongdoing.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
5. Pritchard, M. (1996). Reasonable Children: Moral Education and Moral Learning. Lawrence,
KS: Kansas University Press.
6. Hu, Chuck and Jawer, Bruce. (1994). "Toward a Design Ethic for Computing Professionals." Social
Issues in computing: Putting Computing in its Place. Eds. Chuck Hu and Thomas Finholt.
New York: McGraw-Hill. 130-136.
7. Janis, I. Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes2nd Ed..
Boston, Mass: Wadsworth.
8. Sunstein, C.R. (2006). Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 217-225.

9
1.3 Moral Exemplars in Business and Professional Ethics

1.3.1 Module Introduction

Through the activities of this module you will learn to balance cautionary tales in business and professional
ethics with new stories about those who consistently act in a morally exemplary way. While cautionary
tales teach us what to avoid, narratives from the lives of moral exemplars show us how to be good. A study
of moral best practices in business and professional ethics shows that moral exemplars exhibit positive and
learnable skills. This module, then, looks at moral exemplars in business and the professions, outlines their
outstanding accomplishments, and helps you to unpack the strategies they use to overcome obstacles to
doing good.
You will begin by identifying outstanding individuals in business and associated practices who have
developed moral "best practices." Your task is look at these individuals, retell their stories, identify the skills
that help them do good, and build a foundation for a more comprehensive study of virtue in occupational
and professional ethics.

1.3.2 Exercise 1: Choose a moral exemplar

• Identify a moral exemplar and provide a narrative description of his or her life story.
• To get this process started, look at the list of moral exemplars provided in this module. The links in
the upper left hand corner of this module will help you to explore their accomplishments in detail. Feel
free to choose your own exemplar. Make sure you identify someone in the occupational and professional
areas such as business and engineering. These areas have more than their share of exemplars, but they
tend to escape publicity because their actions avoid publicity generating disasters rather than bring
them about.

1.3.3 Moral Exemplars

• 1. William LeMesseur. LeMesseur designed the Citicorp Building in New York. When a student
identied a critical design aw in the building during a routine class exercise, LeMesseur responded, not
by shooting the messenger, but by developing an intricate and eective plan for correcting the problem
before it issued in drastic real world consequences. Check out LeMesseur's prole at onlineethics and
see how he turned a potential disaster into a good deed.
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14 CHAPTER 1. ETHICAL THEORY AND GROUP WORK

• 2. Fred Cuny, starting in 1969 with Biafra, carried out a series of increasingly eective interventions
in international disasters. He brought eective methods to disaster relief such as engineering know-
how, political savvy, good business sense, and aggressive advocacy. His timely interventions saved
thousands of Kurdish refugees in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. He also helped design
and implement an innovative water ltration system in Sarajevo during the Bosnia-Serb conict in
1993. For more details, consult the biographical sketch at onlineethics.
• 3. Roger Boisjoly worked on a team responsible for developing o-ring seals for fuel tanks used in the
Challenger Shuttle. When his team noticed evidence of gas leaks he made an emergency presentation
before ocials of Morton Thiokol and NASA recommending postponing the launch scheduled for the
next day. When decision makers refused to change the launch date, Boisjoly watched in horror the next
day as the Challenger exploded seconds into its ight. Find out about the courageous stand Boisjoly
took in the aftermath of the Challenger explosion by reading the biographical sketch at onlineethics.
• 4. Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2006. His eort in setting up "micro-businesses"
funded through "micro-lending" has completely changed the paradigm on how to extend business
practices to individuals at the bottom of the pyramid. Learn about his strategies for creating micro-
businesses and how those strategies have been extended throughout the world, including Latin America,
by listening to an interview with him broadcast by the Online News Hour. (See link included in this
module.)
• 5. Bill Gates has often been portrayed as a villain, especially during the anti-trust suit against Mircosoft
in the mid 1990's. Certainly his aggressive and often ruthless business practices need to be evaluated
openly and critically. But recently Gates stopped participating in the day-to-day management of
his company, Microsoft, and has set up a charitable foundation to oversee international good works
projects. Click on the link included in this module to listen to and read an interview recently conducted
with him and his wife, Melinda, on their charitable eorts.
• 6. Jerey Skilling, former CEO of Enron, can hardly be called a moral exemplar. Yet when Enron was
at its peak, its CEO, Jerey Skilling, was considered among the most innovative, creative, and brilliant
of contemporary corporate CEOs. View the documentary, The Smartest Guys in the Room, read the
book of the same title, and learn about the conguration of character traits that led to Skilling's initial
successes and ultimate failure. A link included in this module will lead you to an interview with Skilling
conducted on March 28, 2001.
• Inez Austin worked to prevent contamination from nuclear wastes produced by a plutonium production
facility. Visit Online Ethics by clicking on the link above to nd out more about her heroic stand.
• Rachael Carson's book, The Silent Spring, was one of the key events inaugurating the environmental
movement in the United States. For more on the content of her life and her own personal act of courage,
visit the biographical prole at Online Ethics. You can click on the Supplimental Link provided above.

1.3.4 Exercise Two: Moral Exemplar Proles

• What are the positive and negative inuences you can identify for your moral exemplar?
• What good deeds did your exemplar carry out?
• What obstacles did your moral exemplar face and how did he or she overcome them?
• What skills, attitudes, beliefs, and emotions helped to orient and motivate your moral exemplar.?

1.3.5 Exercise Three

Prepare a short dramatization of a key moment in the life of your group's moral exemplar.

1.3.6 Textbox: Two dierent Types of Moral Exemplar

• Studies carried out by Chuck Hu into moral exemplars in computing suggest that moral exemplars
can operate as craftspersons or reformers. (Sometimes they can combine both these modes.)

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• Craftspersons (1) draw on pre-existing values in computing, (2) focus on users or customers who have
needs, (3) take on the role of providers of a service/product, (4) view barriers as inert obstacles or
puzzles to be solved, and (5) believe they are eective in their role.
• Reformers (1) attempt to change organizations and their values, (2) take on the role of moral crusaders,
(3) view barriers as active opposition, and (4) believe in the necessity of systemic reform
• These descriptions of moral exemplars have been taken from a presentation by Hu at the STS col-
loquium at the University of Virginia on October 2006. Hu's presentation can be found at the link
provided in the upper left hand corner of this module.

1.3.7 What Makes a Moral Exemplar? PRIMES Explained

General Comments on Exemplars

• Moral exemplars have succeeded in integrating moral and professional attitudes and beliefs into their
core identity. Going against these considerations for moral exemplars is tantamount to acting against
self. Acting in accordance with them becomes second nature.
• Moral exemplars often achieve their aims with the support of "support groups." In fact, moral exemplars
are often particularly adept at drawing support from surrounding individuals, groups and communities.
This goes against the notion that exemplars are isolated individuals who push against the current. (Not
all exemplars need t as heroes into Ayn Rand novels.)
• Moral exemplars often do not go through periods of intensive and prolonged deliberation in order to hit
upon the correct action. If we want a literary example, we need to replace the tortured deliberations
of a Hamlet with the quick and intuitive insight of an Esther Summerson. (Summerson is a character
in Charles Dickens' novel, Bleak House. See both William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens for more
examples of villains and exemplars.) Some have situated moral exemplars within virtue ethics. They
have cultivated moral habits that allow them to do good as second nature. They have also found ways
to integrate moral reasoning with emotion (as motive), perception (which helps them zero in on moral
relevance), and skill (which helps implement moral value). In this sense, moral expertise functions
much as athletic or technical expertise; all are dicult to acquire but once acquired lead to highly
skilled actions performed almost eortlessly.

PRIMES
Primes stands for Personality, Integrating value into self-system, Moral Ecology, and Moral Skills Sets.
These are the elements composing moral expertise that have been identied by Hu and Rogerson based on
interviews they conducted with exemplars in the areas of computing.
Personality

• Moral exemplars exhibit dierent congurations of personality traits based on the big ve. Locate the
moral exemplar you have chosen in terms of the following ve continuums (or continua):
• Neuroticism to Lack of Neuroticism (Stability?)
• Agreeableness to Disagreeableness
• Extraversion to Introversion
• Openness to Closedness
• Conscientiousness to Lack of Conscientiousness
• Examine your exemplar on each of these scales. In and of themselves, these qualities are neither good
nor bad. They can be integrated to form bad characters or good characters. In many cases, moral
exemplars stand out through how they have put their personality characteristics to "good use." (They
have used them as vehicles or channels to excellence.)

Integrating Moral Value into Self-System

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16 CHAPTER 1. ETHICAL THEORY AND GROUP WORK

• As said above, moral exemplars stand out by the way in which (and the extent to which) they have
integrated moral value into their self-system. Because of this, they are strongly motivated to do good
and avoid doing bad. Both (doing good and refraining from doing bad) express who they are. If they
slip into bad deeds, this motivational system pushes them to improve to avoid repeating bad deeds.
• One way of integrating moral value into self-system is by looking at stories and narratives of those
who have displayed moral excellence. Many of the individuals portrayed above (Carson, Boisjoly,
LeMesseur, Cuny, Austin, and Yunus) provide concrete models of outstanding moral careers.
• Literature also provides its models of moral exemplars. Charles Dickens paints especially powerful
portraits of both moral heroes (Esther Summerson and "Little Dorritt") and villains (Heep and Skim-
pole).
• Other vehicles for integrating moral value centrally into the self-system lie in aliations, relationships,
and friendships. Aristotle shows the importance of good friendships in developing virtues. Moral
exemplars most often can point to others who have served as mentors or strong positive inuences.
For example, Roger Boisjoly tells of how he once went to a senior colleague for advice on whether to
sign o on a design that was less than optimal. His colleague's advice: would you be comfortable with
your wife or child using a product based on this design?
• The ethicist, Bernard Williams, has argued forcefully for the importance of personal projects in estab-
lishing and maintaining integrity. Personal projects, roles, and life tasks all convey value; when these
hold positive moral value and become central unifying factors in one's character, then they also serve
to integrate moral value into the self system.
• Augusto Blasi, a well known moral psychologist, gives a particularly powerful account (backed by
research) of the integration of moral value into self-system and its motivational eect.

Moral Ecology

• Moral Ecologies: "The term moral ecology encourages us to consider the complex web of relationships
and inuences, the long persistence of some factors and the rapid evolution of others, the variations
in strength and composition over time, the micro-ecologies that can exist within larger ones, and the
multidirectional nature of causality in an ecology." From Hu et. al.
• Moral ecologies refer to social surrounds, that is, the dierent groups, organizations, and societies that
surround us and to which we are continually responding.
• We interact with these social surrounds as organisms interact with their surrounding ecosystems. In
fact, moral ecologies oer us roles (like ecological niches) and envelop us in complex organizational
systems (the way ecosystems are composed of interacting and interrelated parts). We inhabit and act
within several moral ecologies; these moral ecologies, themselves, interact. Finally, moral ecologies,
like natural ecosystems, seek internal and external harmony and balance. Internally, it is important
to coordinate dierent the constituent individuals and the roles they play. Externally, it is dicult
but equally important to coordinate and balance the conicting aims and activities of dierent moral
ecologies.
• Moral ecologies shape who we are and what we do. This is not to say that they determine us. But
they do channel and constrain us. For example, your parents have not determined who you are. But
much of what you do responds to how you have experienced them; you agree with them, refuse to
question their authority, disagree with them, and rebel against them. The range of possible responses
is considerable but these are all shaped by what you experienced from your parents in the past.
• The moral ecologies module (see the link provided above) describes three dierent moral ecologies that
are important in business: quality-, customer-, and nance-driven companies. (More "kinds" could
be generated by combining these in dierent ways: for example, one could characterize a company
as customer-driven but transforming into a quality-driven company.) Roles, strategies for dissent,
assessment of blame and praise, and other modes of conduct are shaped and constrained by the overall
character of the moral ecology.
• Moral ecologies, like selves, can also be characterized in terms of the "centrality" of moral value. Some
support the expression of moral value or certain kinds of moral value (like loyalty) while undermining

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or suppressing the expression of others (like courage or autonomy).

• Finally, think in terms of how personality traits integrated around moral value interact with dierent
types of moral ecology. If a moral ecology undermines virtuous conduct, what strategies are available
for changing it? Or resisting it? If there are dierent kinds of moral exemplar, which pair best with
which moral ecology? (How would a helper or craftsperson prevail in a nance-driven moral ecology
like those characterized by Robert Jackall in Moral Mazes?

Moral Skills Sets

• Moral expertise is not reducible to knowing what constitutes good conduct and doing your best to
bring it about. Realizing good conduct, being an eective moral agent, bringing value into the work,
all require skills in addition to a "good will." PRIMES studies have uncovered four skill sets that play
a decisive role in the exercise of moral expertise.
• Moral Imagination: The ability to project into the standpoint of others and view the situation
at hand through their lenses. Moral imagination achieves a balance between becoming lost in the
perspectives of others and failing to leave one's own perspective. Adam Smith terms this balance
"proportionality" which we can achieve in empathy when we feel with them but do not become lost
in their feelings. Empathy consists of feeling with others but limiting the intensity of that feeling to
what is proper and proportionate for moral judgment.
• Moral Creativity: Moral Creativity is close to moral imagination and, in fact, overlaps with it.
But it centers in the ability to frame a situation in dierent ways. Patricia Werhane draws attention
to a lack of moral creativity in the Ford Pinto case. Key Ford directors framed the problem with
the gas tank from an economical perspective. Had they considered other framings they might have
appreciated the callousness of refusing to recall Pintos because the costs of doing so (and retrotting
the gas tanks) were greater than the benets (saving lives). They did not see the tragic implications
of their comparison because they only looked at the economic aspects. Multiple framings open up new
perspectives that make possible the design of non-obvious solutions.
• Reasonableness: Reasonableness balances openness to the views of others (one listens and impartially
weighs their arguments and evidence) with commitment to moral values and other important goals.
One is open but not to the extent of believing anything and failing to keep fundamental commitments.
The Ethics of Team Work module (see link above) discusses strategies for reaching consensus that are
employed by those with the skill set of reasonableness. These help avoid the pitfalls of group-based
deliberation and action.
• Perseverance: Finally, perseverance is the "ability to plan moral action and continue on that course
by responding to circumstances and obstacles while keeping ethical goals intact." Hu et. al.

1.3.8 Presentation on Moral Exemplars

[Media Object]10
1.3.9 Blbliography
• Blasi, A. (2004). Moral Functioning: Moral Understanding and Personality. In D.K Lapsley and D.
Narvaez (Eds.) Moral Development, Self, and Identity, (pp. 335-347). Mahwah, N. J.: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
• Colby, A., Damon, W. (1992). Some do care: Contemporary lives of moral commitment. New York:
Free Press.
• Flanagan, O. (1991). Varieties of moral personality: Ethics and psychological realism. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
10 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<Brief Comments on Moral Exemplars.pptx>

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18 CHAPTER 1. ETHICAL THEORY AND GROUP WORK

• Hu, C., Rogerson, S. (2005). Craft and reform in moral exemplars in computing. Paper presented at
ETHICOMP2005 in Linköping, September.
• Hu, C., Frey, W. (2005). Moral Pedagogy and Practical Ethics. Science and Engineering Ethics,
11(3), 389-408.
• Hu, C., Barnard, L., Frey, W. (2008). Good computing: a pedagogically focused model of virtue
in the practice of computing (part 1), Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society,
6(3), 246-278.
• Hu, C., Barnard, L., Frey, W. (2008). Good computing: a pedagogically focused model of virtue
in the practice of computing (part 2), Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society,
6(4), 286- 316.
• Jackall, R. (1988). Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Johnson, M. (1993). Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics. Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 199-202.
• Lawrence, A. and Weber, J. (2010). Business and Society: Stakeholders Ethics and Public Policy, 13th
Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Pritchard, M. (1998). "Professional Responsibility: Focusing on the Exemplary," in Science and Engi-
neering Ethics, 4: 215-234.
• Werhane, P. (1999). Moral Imagination and Management Decision Making. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 93-96.

Insert paragraph text here.

11
1.4 Theory-Building Activities: Virtue Ethics

Based on material presented by Chuck Hu (St. Olaf College) and William Frey at the Association for
Practical and Professional Ethics in 2005 at San Antonio, TX. Preliminary versions were distributed during
this presentation.

1.4.1 Module Introduction

This module uses materials being prepared for Good Computing: A Virtue Approach to Computer Ethics,
to set up an exercise in which you will identify and spell out virtues relevant to your professional discipline.
After identifying these virtues, you will work to contextualize them in everyday practice. Emphasis will be
placed on the Aristotelian approach to virtues which describes a virtue as the disposition toward the mean
located between the extremes of excess and defect. You will also be asked to identify common obstacles
that prevent professionals from realizing a given virtue and moral exemplars who demonstrate consistent
success in realizing these virtues and responding to obstacles that stand in the way of their realization. In a
variation on this module you could be asked to compare the virtues you have identied for your profession
with virtues that belong to other moral ecologies such as those of the Homeric warrier.

1.4.2 Three Versions of Virtue Ethics: Virtue 1, Virtue 2, and Virtue 3

Virtue ethics has gone through three historical versions. The rst, Virtue 1, was set forth by Aristotle in
ancient Greece. While tied closely to practices in ancient Greece that no longer exist today, Aristotle's
version still has a lot to say to us in this day and age. In the second half of the twentieth century, British
philosophical ethicists put forth a related but dierent theory of virtue ethics (virtue 2) as an alternative to
the dominant ethical theories of utilitarianism and deontology. Virtue 2 promised a new foundation of ethics
consistent with work going on at that time in the philosophy of mind. Proponents felt that turning from the
action to the agent promised to free ethical theory from the intractable debate between utilitarianism and
deontology and oered a way to expand scope and relevance of ethics. Virtue 3 reconnects with Aristotle
11 This content is available online at <http://cnx.org/content/m13755/1.13/>.

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 19

and virtue 1 even though it drops the doctrine of the mean and Aristotle's emphasis on character. Using
recent advances in moral psychology and moral pedagogy, it seeks to rework key Aristotelian concepts in
modern terms. In the following, we will provide short characterizations of each of these three versions of
virtue ethics.

1.4.3 Virtue 1: Aristotle's Virtue Ethics

• Eudaimonia. Happiness, for Aristotle, consists of a life spent fullling the intellectual and moral
virtues. These modes of action are auto-telic, that is, they are self-justifying and contain their own
ends. By carrying out the moral and intellectual virtues for a lifetime, we realize ourselves fully as
humans. Because we are doing what we were meant to do, we are happy in this special sense of
eudaimonia.
• Arete. Arete is the Greek word we usually translate as "virtue". But arete is more faithfully translated
as excellence. For Aristotle, the moral and intellectual virtues represent excellences. So the moral life
is more than just staying out of trouble. Under Aristotle, it is centered in pursuing and achieving
excellence for a lifetime.
• Virtue as the Mean. Aristotle also characterizes virtue as a settled disposition to choose the mean
between the extremes of excess and defect, all relative to person and situation. Courage (the virtue)
is the mean between the extremes of excess (too much courage or recklessness) and defect (too little
courage or cowardice). Aristotle's claim that most or all of the virtues can be specied as the mean
between extremes is controversial. While the doctrine of the mean is dropped in Virtue 2 and Virtue 3,
we will still use it in developing virtue tables. (See exercise 1 below.) You may not nd both extremes
for the virtues you have been assigned but make the eort nonetheless.
• Ethos. "Ethos" translates as character which, for Aristotle, composes the seat of the virtues. Virtues
are well settled dispositions or habits that have been incorporated into our characters. Because our
characters are manifested in our actions, the patterns formed by these over time reveal who we are.
This can be formulated as a decision-making test, the public identication test. Because we reveal
who we are through our actions we can ask, when considering an action, whether we would care to
be publicly identied with this action. "Would I want to be publicly known as the kind of person
who would perform that kind of action? Would I, through my cowardly action, want to be publicly
identied as a coward? Would I, through my responsible action, want to be publicly identied as a
responsible person? Because actions provide others with a window into our characters, we must make
sure be sure that they portray us as we want to be portrayed.
• Aisthesis of the Phronimos. This Greek phrase, roughly translated as the perception of the morally
experienced agent, reveals how important practice and experience are to Aristotle in his conception
of moral development. One major dierence between Aristotle and other ethicists (utilitarians and
deontologists) is the emphasis that Aristotle places on developing into or becoming a moral person.
For Aristotle, one becomes good by rst repeatedly performing good actions. So morality is more
like an acquired skill than a mechanical process. Through practice we develop sensitivities to what is
morally relevant in a situation, we learn how to structure our situations to see moral problems and
possibilities, and we develop the skill of "hitting" consistently on the mean between the extremes. All
of these are skills that are cultivated in much the same way as a basketball player develops through
practice the skill of shooting the ball through the hoop.
• Bouleusis. This word translates as "deliberation." For Aristotle, moral skill is not the product of
extensive deliberation (careful, exhaustive thinking about reasons, actions, principles, concepts, etc.)
but of practice. Those who have developed the skill to nd the mean can do so with very little thought
and eort. Virtuous individuals, for Aristotle, are surprisingly unreective. They act virtuously
without thought because it has become second nature to them.
• Akrasia. Ross translates this word as "incontinence" which is outmoded. A better translation is
weakness of will. For Aristotle, knowing where virtue lies is not the same as doing what virtue demands.
There are those who are unable to translate knowledge into resolution and then into action. Because
akrasis (weakness of will) is very real for Aristotle, he also places emphasis in his theory of moral

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20 CHAPTER 1. ETHICAL THEORY AND GROUP WORK

development on the cultivation of proper emotions to help motivate virtuous action. Later ethicists
seek to oppose emotion and right action; Aristotle sees properly trained and cultivated emotions as
strong motives to doing what virtue requires.
• Logos Aristotle's full denition of virtue is "a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a
mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle
by which [a person] of practical wisdom would determine it." (Ross's translation in Nichomachean
Ethics, 1106b, 36.) We have talked about character, the mean, and the person of practical wisdom.
The last key term is "logos" which in this denition is translated by reason. This is a good translation
if we take reason in its fullest sense so that it is not just the capacity to construct valid arguments
but also includes the practical wisdom to assess the truth of the premises used in constructing these
arguments. In this way, Aristotle expands reason beyond logic to include a fuller set of intellectual,
practical, emotional, and perceptual skills that together form a practical kind of wisdom.

1.4.4 Virtue 2
• The following summary of Virtue 2 is taken largely from Rosalind Hursthouse. While she extensively
qualies each of these theses in her own version of virtue ethics, these points comprise an excellent
summary of Virtue 2 which starts with G.E.M. Anscombe's article, "Modern Moral Philosophy," and
continues on into the present. Hursthouse presents this characterization of Virtue 2 in her book, On
Virtue Ethics (2001) U.K.: Oxford University Press: 17.
• Virtue 2 is agent centered. Contrary to deontology and utilitarianism which focus on whether
actions are good or right, V2 is agent centered in that it sees the action as an expression of the goodness
or badness of the agent. Utilitarianism focuses on actions which bring about the greatest happiness
for the greatest number; deontology seeks those actions that respect the autonomy of individuals and
carry out moral obligations, especially duties. These theories emphasize doing what is good or right.
Virtue 2, on the other hand, focuses on the agent's becoming or being good.
• Can Virtue 2 tell us how to act? Because V2 is agent-centered, critics claim that it cannot provide
insight into how to act in a given situation. All it can say is, "Act the way a moral exemplar would
act." But what moral standards do moral exemplars use or embody in their actions? And what moral
standards do we use to pick out the moral exemplars themselves? Hursthouse acknowledges that this
criticism hits home. However, she points out that the moral standards come from the moral concepts
that we apply to moral exemplars; they are individuals who act courageously, exercise justice,
and realize honesty. The moral concepts "courage," "justice," and "honesty" all have independent
content that helps guide us. She also calls this criticism unfair: while virtue 2 may not provide
any more guidance than deontology or utilitarianism, it doesn't provide any less. Virtue 2 may not
provide perfect guidance, but what it does provide is favorably comparable to what utilitarianism and
deontology provide.
• Virtue 2 replaces Deontic concepts (right, duty, obligation) with Aretaic concepts (good,
virtue). This greatly changes the scope of ethics. Deontic concepts serve to establish our minimum
obligations. On the other hand, aretaic concepts bring the pursuit of excellence within the purview of
ethics. Virtue ethics produces a change in our moral language that makes the pursuit of excellence an
essential part of moral inquiry.
• Finally, there is a somewhat dierent account of virtue 2 (call it virtue 2a) that can be attributed to
Alisdair MacIntyre. This version "historicizes" the virtues, that is, looks at how our concepts of key
virtues have changed over time. (MacIntyre argues that the concept of justice, for example, varies
greatly depending on whether one views justice in Homeric Greece, Aristotle's Greece, or Medieval
Europe.) Because he argues that skills and actions are considered virtuous only in relation to a
particular historical and community context, he redenes virtues as those skill sets necessary to realize
the goods or values around which social practices are built and maintained. This notion ts in well
with professional ethics because virtues can be derived from the habits, attitudes, and skills needed to
maintain the cardinal ideals of the profession.

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 21

1.4.5 Virtue 3
Virtue 3 can best be outlined by showing how the basic concepts of Virtue 1 can be reformu-
lated to reect current research in moral psychology.

1. Reformulating Happiness (Eudaimonia). Mihaly Csikcszentmihalyi has described ow experi-

ences (see text box below) in which autotelic activities play a central role. For Aristotle, the virtues
also are autotelic. They represent faculties whose exercise is key to realizing our fullest potentialities as
human beings. Thus, virtues are self-validating activities carried out for themselves as well as for the
ends they bring about. Flow experiences are also important in helping us to conceptualize the virtues
in a professional context because they represent a well practiced integration of skill, knowledge, and
moral sensitivity.
2. Reformulating Values (Into Arete or Excellence). To carry out the full project set forth by virtue
3, it is necessary to reinterpret as excellence key moral values such as honesty, justice, responsibility,
reasonableness, and integrity. For example, moral responsibility has often been described as carrying
out basic, minimal moral obligations. As an excellence, responsibility becomes refocused on extending
knowledge and power to expand our range of eective, moral action. Responsibility reformulated as
an excellence also implies a high level of care that goes well beyond what is minimally required.
3. De-emphasizing Character. The notion of character drops out to be replaced by more or less
enduring and integrated skills sets such as moral imagination, moral creativity, reasonableness, and
perseverance. Character emerges from the activities of integrating personality traits, acquired skills,
and deepening knowledge around situational demands. The unity character represents is always com-
plex and changing.
4. Practical Skill Replaces Deliberation. Moral exemplars develop skills which, through practice,
become second nature. These skills obviate the need for extensive moral deliberation. Moral exemplars
resemble more skillful athletes who quickly develop responses to dynamic situations than Hamlets
stepping back from action for prolonged and agonizing deliberation.
5. Greater Role for Emotions. Nancy Sherman discusses how, for Aristotle, emotion is not treated
as an irrational force but as an eective tool for moral action once it has been shaped and cultivated
through proper moral education. To step beyond the controvery of what Aristotle did and did not say
about the emotions (and where he said it) we place this enhanced role for emotions within virtue 3.
Emotions carry out four essential functions: (a) they serve as modes of attention; (b) they also serve
as modes of responding to or signaling value; (c) they fulll a revelatory function; and (d) they provide
strong motives to moral action. Nancy Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and
Kant on Virtue (1997), U.K.: Cambridge University Press: 39-50.

1.4.6 Flow Experiences

• The psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, has carried out fascinating research on what he terms "ow
experiences." Mike Martin in Meaningful Work (2000) U.K.: Oxford,: 24, summarizes these in the
following bullets:
• "clear goals as one proceeds"
• "immediate feedback about progress"
• "a balance between challenges and our skills to respond to them"
• "immersion of awareness in the activity without disruptive distractions"
• "lack of worry about failure"
• loss of anxious self-consciousness"
• time distortions (either time ying or timeslowing pleasurably)"
• the activity becomes autotelic: an end in itself, enjoyed as such"

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22 CHAPTER 1. ETHICAL THEORY AND GROUP WORK

1.4.7 Virtue Tables

The table just below provides a format for spelling out individual virtues through (1) a general description,
(2) the correlative vices of excess and defect, (3) the skills and mental states that accompany and support
it, and (4) real and ctional individuals who embody it. Following the table are hints on how to identify and
characterize virtues. We start with the virtue of integrity:

Virtue Description Excess Defect Obstacles Moral Exem-

to realizing plar
the virtue in
professional
practices
Integrity A meta-virtue Excess: Defect: Wan- Individual Saint Thomas
in which the Rigidity tonness. A corruption: In- More as por-
holder ex- sticking to condition dividuals can trayed in
hibits unity one
s guns where one be tempted by Robert Bolt
s
of character even when one exhibits no greed toward A Man for All
manifested is obviously stability or the vice of Seasons. More
in holding wrong(2,3) consistency in defect. Lack of refuses to take
together even character moral courage an oath that
in the face of can also move goes against
strong disrup- one to both the core be-
tive pressures extremes liefs in terms
or temptations of which he
denes himself.
Institutional
Corruption:
One may work
in an organi-
zation where
corruption
is the norm.
This generates
dilemmas like
following an
illegal order or
getting red.

Table 1.3

1.4.8 Exercise 1: Construct Virtue Tables for Professional Virtues

1. Discuss in your group why the virtue you have been assigned is important for the practice of your
profession. What goods or values does the consistent employment of this virtue produce?
2. Use the discussion in #1 to develop a general description of your virtue. Think along the following
lines: people who have virtue X tend to exhibit certain characteristics (or do certain things) in certain
kinds of situations. Try to think of these situations in terms of what is common and important to your
profession or practice.
3. Identify the corresponding vices. What characterizes the points of excess and defect between which
your virtue as the mean lies?

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 23

4. What obstacles arise that prevent professionals from practicing your virtue? Do well-meaning profes-
sionals lack power or technical skill? Can virtues interfere with the realization of non-moral values like
nancial values? See if you can think of a supporting scenario or case here.
5. Identify a moral exemplar for your virtue. Make use of the exemplars described in the Moral Exem-
plars in Business and Professional Ethics module.
6. Go back to task #2. Redene your description of your virtue in light of the subsequent tasks, especially
the moral exemplar you identied. Check for coherence.
7. Finally, does your virtue stand alone or does it need support from other virtues or skills? For example,
integrity might also require moral courage.

1.4.9 Exercise 2: Reect on these Concluding Issues

• Did you have trouble identifying a moral exemplar? Many turn to popular gures for their moral
exemplars. Movies and ction also oer powerful models. Why do you think that it is hard to nd
moral exemplars in your profession? Is it because your profession is a den of corruption? (Probably
not.) Do we focus more on villains than on heroes? Why or why not?
• What did you think about the moral leaders portrayed in the Moral Exemplars in Business and
Professional Ethics module?
• Did you have trouble identifying both vices, i.e., vices of excess and defect? If so, do you think this
because some virtues may not have vices of excess and defect? What do you think about Aristotle's
doctrine of the mean?
• Did you notice that the virtue proles given by your group and the other groups in the class overlapped?
Is this a problem for virtue theory? Why do our conceptions of the key moral values and virtues overlap?
• Did you nd the virtues dicult to apply? What do you think about the utilitarian and deontological
criticism of virtue ethics, namely, that it cannot provide us with guidelines on how to act in dicult
situations? Should ethical theories emphasize the act or the person? Or both?
• The most tenacious obstacle to working with virtue ethics is to change focus from the morally minimal
to the morally exemplary. Virtue is the translation of the Greek word, arête. But excellence is,
perhaps, a better word. Understanding virtue ethics requires seeing that virtue is concerned with the
exemplary, not the barely passable. (Again, looking at moral exemplars helps.) Arête transforms
our understanding of common moral values like justice and responsibility by moving from minimally
acceptable to exemplary models.

Moral Leaders12 The proles of several moral leaders in practical and professional ethics. Computer Ethics
Cases13 This link provides several computer ethics cases and also has a description of decision making and
socio-technical systems frameworks. Moral Exemplars in Business and Professional Ethics (Section 1.3)
Proles of several moral leaders in practical and professional ethics.

1.4.10 Presentation on Virtue Ethics

[Media Object]14
1.4.11 Resources
• Murdoch, I. (1970). The Sovereignty of Good. UK: London, Routledge.
• Sherman, N. (1989). The Fabric of Character: Aristotle's Theory of Virtue. UK: Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
12 http://www.onlineethics.org
13 http://www.computingcases.org
14 This media object is a downloadablele. Please view or download it at
<An Introduction to Virtue Ethics.pptx>

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24 CHAPTER 1. ETHICAL THEORY AND GROUP WORK

• Hursthouse, R. (1999). On Virtue Ethics. UK: Oxford, Oxford University Press.

• Virtue Ethics. (2003). Edited by Stephen Darwall. UK: Oxford: Blackwell.
• Blum, L. (1994). Moral Perception and Particularity. UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Pincos, E.L. (1986). Quandaries and Virtues: Against Reductivism in Ethics. Lawrence, KS: Uni-
versity of Kansas Press.
• Virtue Ethics (1997). Edited by Crisp, R. and Slote, M. UK: Oxford, Oxford University Press.
• Environmental Virtue Ethics. (2005). Edited by Sandler, R. and Cafaro, P. New York: Rowman and
Littleeld.
• Frey, W. (2008). Engineering Ethics in Puerto Rico: Issues and Narratives. Science and Engineering
Ethics, 14: 417-431.
• Frey, W. (2010). Teaching Virtue: Pedagogical Implications of Moral Psychology. Science and Engi-
neering Ethics, 16: 611-628.
• Hu, C., Barnard, L. and Frey, W. (2008) Good computing: a pedagogically focused model of virtue
in the practice of computing (parts 1 and 2)." Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, 6(3),
246-278.
• Hu, C., Barnard, L. and Frey, W. (2008) Good computing: a pedagogically focused model of virtue
in the practice of computing (parts 1 and 2). Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, 6(4),
284-316.,

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Chapter 2

Decision Making in the Professional

Context
1
2.1 Theory-Building Activities: Rights

2.1.1 Module Introduction

Preliminary Draft distributed at APPE, 2005 in San Antonio, TX
Engineers and other professionals work in large corporations under the supervision of managers who
may lack their expertise, skills, and commitment to professional standards. This creates communication
and ethical challenges. At the very least, professionals are put in the position of having to advocate their
ethical and professional standards to those who, while not being opposed to them, may not share their
understanding of and commitment to them.
This module is designed to give you the tools and the practice using them necessary to prevail in situations
that require advocacy of ethical and professional standards. In this module you carry out several activities.
(1) You will study the philosophical and ethical foundations of modern rights theory through a brief look at
Kantian Formalism. (2) You will learn a framework for examining the legitimacy of rights claims. (3) You
will practice this framework by examining several rights claims that engineers make over their supervisors.
This examination will require that you reject certain elements, rephrase others, and generally recast the
claim to satisfy the requirments of the rights justication framework. (4) Finally, in small groups you will
build tables around your reformulation of these rights claims and present the results to the class. This
module will help you to put your results together with the rest of your classmates and collectively assemble
a toolkit consisting of the legitimate rights claims that engineers and other professionals can make over their
managers and supervisors.
For more background on rights theory and the relation of rights and duties see (1) Henry Shue, Basic
Rights: Subsistence, Auence, and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2nd edition, Princeton, 1980 and (2)
Thomas Donaldson, The Ethics of International Business, Oxford, 1989. This exercise has been used
in computer and engineering ethics classes at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez from 2002 on to
the present. It is being incorporated into the textbook, Good Computing: A Virtue Approach to Computer
Ethics by Chuck Hu, William Frey, and Jose Cruz.

2.1.2 What you need to know...

Problematic Right Claims
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25
26 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

1. El derecho para actuar de acuerdo a la conciencia etica y rechazar trabajos en los cuales exista una
variacion de opinones morales.
2. El derecho de expresar juicio profesional, y hacer pronunciamientos publicos que sean consistentes con
restricciones corporativas sobre la informacion propietaria.
3. El derecho a la lealtad corporativa y la libertad de que sea hecho un chivo expiatorio para catastrofes
naturales, ineptitud de administracion u otras fuerzas mas alla del control del ingeniero.
4. El derecho a buscar el mejoramiento personal mediante estudios postgraduados y envolverse en asocia-
ciones profesionales.
5. .El derecho a participar en actividades de partidos politicos fuera de las horas de trabajo.
6. El derecho a solicitar posiciones superiores con otras companias sin que la companis en la que trabaje
tome represalias contra el ingeniero.
7. El derecho al debido proceso de ley y la libertad de que se le apliquen penalidades arbitrarias o despidos.
8. El derecho a apelar por revision ante una asociacion profesional, ombudsman o arbitro independiente.
9. El derecho a la privacidad personal.
10. Rights claims come from: Bill W. Baker. (2004) "Engineering Ethics: An Overview," in Engineering
Ethics: Concepts, Viewpoints, Cases and Codes, eds. Jimmy H. Smith and Patricia M. Harper.
Compiled and Published by the National Institute for Engineering Ethics: 21-22.
11. Translated into Spanish and published in: Etica en la Practica Profesional de la Ingenieria by
Wilfredo Munoz Roman published in 1998 by the Colegio de Ingenieros y Agrimensores de Puerto Rico
and Universidad Politecnica de Puerto Rico

Problematic Rights Claims quoted directly from Bill Baker, Engineering Ethics: An Overview.
Claims form a "Bill of Rights" set forth by Murray A. Muspratt of Chisholm Institute of
Technology, Victoria, Australia (American society of Civil Engineers' Journal of Professional
Issues in Engineering, October 1985)

1. "The right to act in according to ethical conscience and to decline assignments where a variance of
moral opinion exists.
2. The right to express professional judgment, and to make public pronouncements that are consistent
with corporate constraints on proprietary information.
3. The right to corporate loyalty and freedom from being made a scapegoat for natural catastrophes,
administrative ineptitude or other forces beyond the engineer's control.
4. The right to seek self-improvement by further education and involvement in professional associations.
5. The right to participate in political party activities outside of working hours.
6. The right to apply for superior positions with other companies without being blacklisted.
7. The right to due process and freedom from arbitrary penalties or dismissal.
8. The right to appeal for ethical review by a professional association, ombudsman or independent arbi-
trator.
9. The right to personal privacy."

Kantian Formalism, Part I: Aligning the moral motive and the moral act

• Kant's moral philosophy has exercised substantial inuence over our notions of right and duty. We
begin with a brief summary of this theory based on the work, The Foundations of the Metaphysics
of Morals.
• Kant states that the only thing in this world that is good without qualication is a good will. He
characterizes this will in terms of its motive, "duty for duty's sake."
• Consider the following example. You see a boy drowning. Even though the water is rough and the
current strong you are a good enough swimmer to save him. So while your inclination may be to give
way to fear and walk away, you are duty-bound to save the drowning boy.
• An action (saving or not saving the drowning boy) has moral worth depending on the correct correlation
of right action and right motive. The following table shows this.

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Duty for Duty's Sake

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28 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

Motive = Inclination (desire for Motive = Duty

reward or fear)
Act Conforms to Duty You save the drowning boy for You save the drowning boy be-
the reward. Act conforms to duty cause it is your duty. Act con-
but is motivated by inclination. forms to duty and is for the sake
Has no moral worth. of duty. Your act has moral
worth.
Act violates a duty. You don't save the drowning boy You drown trying to save the
because you are too lazy to jump drowning boy. He also dies. Act
in. Act violates duty motivated fails to carry out duty but is mo-
by inclination. tivated by duty anyway. The act
miscarries but since the motive is
duty it still has moral worth.
Table 2.1

Part II of Kantian Formalism: Giving content to Duty for Duty's Sake

• Kant sees morality as the expression and realization of the rational will. The rst formulation of this
rational will is to will consistently and universally.
• This leads to the Categorical Imperative: I should act only on that maxim (=personal rule
or rule that I give to myself ) that can be converted into a universal law (=a rule that
applies to everybody without self-contradiction).
• This formulation is an imperative because it commands the will of all reasonable beings. It is categorical
because it commands without exceptions or conditions. The CI tells me unconditionally not to lie. It
does not say, do not lie unless it promotes your self interest to do so.
• The following table shows how to use the Categorical Imperative to determine whether I have a duty
not to lie.
Applying the Categorical Imperative

1. Formulate your maxim (=personal rule) Whenever I am in a dicult situation, I should tell
a lie.
2. Universalize your maxim. Whenever anybody is in a dicult situation, he or
she should tell a lie.
3. Check for a contradiction (logical or practical) When I lie, I will the opposite for the universal law.
Put dierently, I will that everybody (but me) be a
truth-teller and that everybody believe me a truth-
teller. I then make myself the exception to this
universal law. Thus my maxim (I am a liar) con-
tradicts the law (everybody else is a truth-teller)
Table 2.2

Kantian Formalism, Part III: The Formula of the End

• When I will one thing as universal law and make myself the exeception in dicult circumstances, I am
treating others, in Kantian terms, merely as means.
• This implies that I subordinate or bend them to my interests and projects without their consent. I
do this by circumventing their autonomy through (1) force, (2) fraud (often deception), or (3) manip-
ulation. Treating them with respect would involve telling them what I want (what are my plans and
projects) and on this basis asking them to consent to particpate and help me. The extreme case for
treating others merely as means is enslaving them.

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• We do on occasion treat others as means (and not as mere means) when we hire them as employees.
But this is consistent with their autonomy and rational consent because we explain to them what is
expected (we give them a job description) and compensate them for their eorts. For this reason there
is a world of dierence between hiring others and enslaving them.
• The Formula of the End = Act so as to treat others (yourself included) always as ends
and never merely as means.

Some Key Denitions for a Rights Framework

• Kantian formalism provides a foundation for respect for the intrinsic value of humans as autonomous
rational beings. Using this as a point of departure, we can develop a method for identifying, spelling out,
and justifying the rights and duties that go with professionalism. This framework can be summarized
in four general propositions:
• 1. Denition: A right is an essential capacity of action that others are obliged to recognize and
respect. This denition follows from autonomy. Autonomy can be broken down into a series of specic
capacities. Rights claims arise when we identify these capacities and take social action to protect them.
Rights are inviolable and cannot be overridden even when overriding would bring about substantial
public utility.
• 2. All rights claims must satisfy three requirements. They must be (1) essential to the autonomy
of individuals and (2) vulnerable so that they require special recognition and protection (on the part
of both individuals and society). Moreover, the burden of recognizing and respecting a claim as a
right must not deprive others of something essential. In other words, it must be (3) feasible for both
individuals and social groups to recognize and respect legitimate rights claims.
• 3. Denition: A duty is a rule or principle requiring that we both recognize and respect the legitimate
rights claims of others. Duties attendant on a given right fall into three general forms: (a) duties not
to deprive, (b) duties to prevent deprivation, and (c) duties to aid the deprived.
• 4. Rights and duties are correlative; for every right there is a correlative series of duties to
recognize and respect that right.
• These four summary points together form a system of professional and occupational rights and correl-
ative duties.

Right Claim Justication Framework

• Essential: To say that a right is essential to autonomy is to say that it highlights a capacity whose
exercise is necessary to the general exercise of autonomy. For example, autonomy is based on certain
knowledge skills. Hence, we have a right to an education to develop the knowledge required by au-
tonomy, or we have a right to the knowledge that produces informed consent. In general, rights are
devices for recognizing certain capacities as essential to autonomy and respecting individuals in their
exercise of these capacities.
• Vulnerable: The exercise of the capacity protected under the right needs protection. Individuals
may interfere with us in our attempt to exercise our rights. Groups, corporations, and governments
might overwhelm us and prevent us from exercising our essential capacities. In short, the exercise of
the capacity requires some sort of protection. For example, an individual's privacy is vulnerable to
violation. People can gain access to our computers without our authorization and view the information
we have stored. They can even use this information to harm us in some way. The right to privacy,
thus, protects certain capacities of action that are vulnerable to interference from others. Individual
and social energy needs to be expended to protect our privacy.
• Feasible: Rights make claims over others; they imply duties that others have. These claims must not
deprive the correlative duty-holders of anything essential. In other words, my rights claims over you
are not so extensive as to deprive you of your rights. My right to life should not deprive you of your
right to self-protection were I to attack you. Thus, the scope of my right claims over you and the rest
of society are limited by your ability to reciprocate. I cannot push my claims over you to recognize
and respect my rights to the point where you are deprived of something essential.

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30 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

Types of Duty Correlative to a Right

• Duty not to deprive: We have a basic duty not to violate the rights of others. This entails that we
must both recognize and respect these rights. For example, computing specialists have the duty not
to deprive others of their rights to privacy by hacking into private les.
• Duty to prevent deprivation: Professionals, because of their knowledge, are often in the position to
prevent others from depriving third parties of their rights. For example, a computing specialist may
nd that a client is not taking sucient pains to protect the condentiality of information about
customers. Outsiders could access this information and use it without the consent of the customers.
The computing specialist could prevent this violation of privacy by advising the client on ways to
protect this information, say, through encryption. The computing specialist is not about to violate the
customers' rights to privacy. But because of special knowledge and skill, the computing specialist may
be in a position to prevent others from violating this right.
• Duty to aid the deprived: Finally, when others have their rights violated, we have the duty to aid them
in their recovery from damages. For example, a computing specialist might have a duty to serve as
an expert witness in a lawsuit in which the plainti seeks to recover damages suered from having her
right to privacy violated. Part of this duty would include accurate, impartial, and expert testimony.

Application of Right/Duty Framework

1. We can identify and dene specic rights such as due process. Moreover, we can set forth some of the
conditions involved in recognizing and respecting this right.
2. Due Process can be justied by showing that it is essential to autonomy, vulnerable, and feasible.
3. Right holders can be specied.
4. Correlative duties and duty holders can be specied.
5. Finally, the correlative duty-levels can be specied as the duties not to violate rights, duties to prevent
rights violations (whenever feasible), and the duties to aid the deprived (whenever is feasible).

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Example Rights Table: Due Process

Right: Due Pro- Justication Right- Correlative Duty- Duty Level

cess Holder:Engineer Holder: Engineer's
as employee and Supervisor, of-
member of profes- cials in profes-
sional society. sional society.
Denition: The Essential: Due Professionals who Human Resources, Not to De-
right to respond Process is essential are subject to pro- Management, prive:Individuals
to organizational in organizations fessional codes of Personnel Depart- cannot be red,
decisions that to prevent the ethics. Supports ment.(Individuals transferred, or
may harm one in deprivation of professionals who with duty to de- demoted without
terms of a serious other rights or are ordered to vi- sign, implement, due process
organizational to provide aid in olate professional and enforce a Prevent Depriva-
grievance proce- the case of their standards. due process pol- tion: Organiza-
dure.Necessary deprivation. icy)Corporate tions can prevent
Conditions:1. Vulnerable: directors have the deprivation by de-
Several levels of Rights in general duty to make sure signing and imple-
appeal.2. Time are not recognized this is being done. menting a compre-
limits to each in the economic hensive due pro-
level of appeal.3. sphere, especially cess policy.
Written notice in organizations.
of grievance.4. Aid the De-
Peer representa- Feasible: Orga- privedBinding
tion.5. Outside nizations, have arbitration and
arbitration. successfully im- legal measures
plemented due must exist to aid
process proce- those deprived of
dures. due process rights

Table 2.3

2.1.3 What you are going to do...

Exercise: Develop a Rights Table

1. You will be divided into small groups and each will be assigned a right claim taken from the above list.
2. Describe the claim (essential capacity of action) made by the right. For example, due process claims
the right to a serious organizational grievance procedure that will enable the right-holder to respond
to a decision that has an adverse impact on his or her interests. It may also be necessary in some
situations to specify the claim's necessary conditions.
3. Justify the right claim using the rights justication framework. In other words show that the right
claim is essential, vulnerable, and feasible.
4. Be sure to show that the right is essential to autonomy. If it is vulnerable be sure to identify the
standard threat. (A standard threat is an existing condition that threatens autonomy.)
5. Provide an example of a situation in which the right claim becomes active. For example, an engineer
may claim a right to due process in order to appeal what he or she considers an unfair dismissal,
transfer, or performance evaluation.
6. Identify the correlative duty-holder(s) that need to take steps to recognize and respect the right. For
example, private and government organizations may be duty-bound to create due process procedures
to recognize and respect this right.

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32 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

7. Further spell out the right by showing what actions the correlative duties involve. For example, a
manager should not violate an employee's due process right by ring him or her without just cause.
The organization's human resources department might carry out a training program to help managers
avoid depriving employees of this right. The organization could aid the deprived by designing and
implementing binding arbitration involving an impartial third party.

Be prepared to debrief on your right claim to the rest of the class. When other groups are debrieng, you are
free to challenge them on whether their claim is essential to autonomy, whether they have identied a valid
"standard threat," and whether the correlative duties are feasible or deprive others of something essential.
Your goal as a class is to have a short but eective list of rights that professionals take with them to the
workplace.
Makes copies of your rights table and give it to the other groups in class. Be sure to make a copy for
your instructor. Together, you will build a table of rights claims that engineers and other professionals make
against managers and corporations. This will provide you a useful and comprehensive decision making tool
in that you will be able to examine decision alternatives in terms of how they stand with regard to the rights
you and your classmates and scrutinized and justied through this exercise.

2.1.4 Conclusion
Conclusion: Topics for Further Reection

• Not every claim to a right is a legitimate or justiable claim. The purpose of this framework is to get
you into the habit of thinking critically and skeptically about the rights claims that you and others
make. Every legitimate right claim is essential, vulnerable, and feasible. Correlative duties are sorted
out according to dierent levels (not to deprive, prevent deprivation, and aid the deprived); this,
in turn, is based on the capacity of the correlative duty holder to carry them out. Finally, duties
correlative to rights cannot deprive the duty-holder of something essential.
• Unless you integrate your right and its correlative duties into the context of your professional or
practical domain, it will remain abstract and irrelevant. Think about your right in the context of
the real world. Think of everyday situations in which the right and its correlative duties will arise.
Invent cases and scenarios. If you are an engineering student, think of informed consent in terms of
the public's right to understand and consent to the risks associated with engineering projects. If you
are a computing student think of what you can do with computing knowledge and skills to respect or
violate privacy rights. Don't stop with an abstract accounting of the right and its correlative duties.
• Rights and duties underlie professional codes of ethics. But this is not always obvious. For example,
the right of free and informed consent underlies much of the engineer's interaction with the public,
especially the code responsibility to hold paramount public health, safety, and welfare. Look at the
dierent stakeholder relations covered in a code of ethics. (In engineering this would include public,
client, profession, and peer.) What are the rights and duties outlined in these stakeholder relations?
How are they covered in codes of ethics?
• This module is eective in counter-acting the tendency to invent rights and use them to rationalize
dubious actions and intentions. Think of rights claims as credit backed by a promise to pay at a later
time. If you make a right claim, be ready to justify it. If someone else makes a right claim, make them
back it up with the justication framework presented in this module.

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2.2 Three Frameworks for Ethical Decision Making and Good Com-
2
puting Reports

2.2.1 Module Introduction

In this module you will learn and practice three frameworks designed to integrate ethics into decision making
in the areas of practical and occupational ethics. The rst framework divides the decision making process
into four stages: problem specication, solution generation, solution testing, and solution implementation.
It is based on an analogy between ethics and design problems that is detailed in a table presented below.
The second framework focuses on the process of solution testing by providing four tests that will help you to
evaluate and rank alternative courses of action. The reversibility, harm/benecence, and public identication
tests each "encapsulate" or summarize an important ethical theory. A value realization test assesses courses
of action in terms of their ability to realize or harmonize dierent moral and nonmoral values. Finally,
a feasibility test will help you to uncover interest, resource, and technical constraints that will aect and
possibly impede the realization of your solution or decision. Taken together, these three frameworks will
help steer you toward designing and implementing ethical decisions the professional and occupational areas.
Two online resources provide more extensive background information. The rst,
www.computingcases.org, provides background information on the ethics tests, socio-technical analy-
sis, and intermediate moral concepts. The second, http://onlineethics.org/essays/education/teaching.html,
explores in more detail the analogy between ethics and design problems. Much of this information will be
published in Good Computing: A Virtue Approach to Computer Ethics, a textbook of cases and decision
making techniques in computer ethics that is being authored by Chuck Hu, William Frey, and Jose A.
Cruz-Cruz.

2.2.2 Problem-Solving or Decision-Making Framework: Analogy between ethics

and design
Traditionally, decision making frameworks in professional and occupational ethics have been taken from
rational decision procedures used in economics. While these are useful, they lead one to think that ethical
decisions are already "out there" waiting to be discovered. In contrast, taking a design approach to ethical
decision making emphasizes that ethical decisions must be created, not discovered. This, in turn, emphasizes
the importance of moral imagination and moral creativity. Carolyn Whitbeck in Ethics in Engineering
Practice and Research describes this aspect of ethical decision making through the analogy she draws between
ethics and design problems in chapter one. Here she rejects the idea that ethical problems are multiple choice
problems. We solve ethical problems not by choosing between ready made solutions given with the situation;
rather we use our moral creativity and moral imagination to design these solutions. Chuck Hu builds on
this by modifying the design method used in software engineering so that it can help structure the process of
framing ethical situations and creating actions to bring these situations to a successful and ethical conclusion.
The key points in the analogy between ethical and design problems are summarized in the table presented
just below.

Analogy between design and ethics problem-solving

Design Problem Ethical Problem
continued on next page

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34 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

Construct a prototype that optimizes (or satisces) Construct a solution that integrates and realizes
designated specications ethical values (justice, responsibility, reasonable-
ness, respect, and safety)
Resolve conicts between dierent specications by Resolve conicts between values (moral vs. moral
means of integration or moral vs. non-moral) by integration
Test prototype over the dierent specications Test solution over dierent ethical considerations
encapsulated in ethics tests
Implement tested design over background con- Implement ethically tested solution over resource,
straints interest, and technical constraints
Table 2.4

2.2.3 Software Development Cycle: Four Stages

(1) problem specication, (2) solution generation, (3) solution testing, and (4) solution implementation.

2.2.4 Problem specication

Problem specication involves exercising moral imagination to specify the socio-technical system (including
the stakeholders) that will inuence and will be inuenced by the decision we are about to make. Stating the
problem clearly and concisely is essential to design problems; getting the problem right helps structure and
channel the process of designing and implementing the solution. There is no algorithm available to crank out
eective problem specication. Instead, we oer a series of guidelines or rules of thumb to get you started
in a process that is accomplished by the skillful exercise of moral imagination.
For a broader problem framing model see Harris, Pritchard, and Rabins, Engineering Ethics: Con-
cepts and Cases, 2nd Edition, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2000, pp. 30-56. See also Cynthia Brincat and
Victoria Wike, Morality and Professional Life: Values at Work, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999.
Dierent Ways of Specifying the Problem

• Many problems can be specied as disagreements. For example, you disagree with your supervisor over
the safety of the manufacturing environment. Disagreements over facts can be resolved by gathering
more information. Disagreements over concepts (you and your supervisor have dierent ideas of what
safety means) require working toward a common denition.
• Other problems involve conicting values. You advocate installing pollution control technology because
you value environmental quality and safety. Your supervisor resists this course of action because
she values maintaining a solid prot margin. This is a conict between a moral value (safety and
environmental quality) and a nonmoral value (solid prots). Moral values can also conict with one
another in a given situation. Using John Doe lawsuits to force Internet Service Providers to reveal
the real identities of defamers certainly protects the privacy and reputations of potential targets of
defamation. But it also places restrictions on legitimate free speech by making it possible for powerful
wrongdoers to intimidate those who would publicize their wrongdoing. Here the moral values of privacy
and free speech are in conict. Value conicts can be addressed by harmonizing the conicting values,
compromising on conicting values by partially realizing them, or setting one value aside while realizing
the other (=value trade os).
• If you specify your problem as a disagreement, you need to describe the facts or concepts about which
there is disagreement.
• If you specify your problem as a conict, you need to describe the values that conict in the situation.
• One useful way of specifying a problem is to carry out a stakeholder analysis. A stakeholder is any
group or individual that has a vital interest at risk in the situation. Stakeholder interests frequently
come into conict and solving these conicts requires developing strategies to reconcile and realize the
conicting stakes.

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• Another way of identifying and specifying problems is to carry out a socio-technical analysis. Socio-
technical systems (STS) embody values. Problems can be anticipated and prevented by specifying
possible value conicts. Integrating a new technology, procedure, or policy into a socio-technical
system can create three kinds of problem. (1) Conict between values in the technology and those in
the STS. For example, when an attempt is made to integrate an information system into the STS of a
small business, the values present in an information system can conict with those in the socio-technical
system. (Workers may feel that the new information system invades their privacy.) (2) Amplication
of existing value conicts in the STS. The introduction of a new technology may magnify an existing
value conict. Digitalizing textbooks may undermine copyrights because digital media is easy to copy
and disseminate on the Internet. (3) Harmful consequences. Introducing something new into a socio-
technical system may set in motion a chain of events that will eventually harm stakeholders in the
socio-technical system. For example, giving laptop computers to public school students may produce
long term environmental harm when careless disposal of spent laptops releases toxic materials into the
environment.
• The following table helps summarize some of these problem categories and then outlines generic solu-
tions.

Problem Type Sub-Type Solution Outline

Disagreement Factual Type and mode of gathering information
Conceptual Concept in dispute and method for
agreeing on its denition
Conict Moral vs. Moral Value Integrative Partially Value In- Trade O
Non-moral vs. tegrative
moral
Non-moral vs.
non-moral
Framing Corruption Strategy for main- Strategy for Value integrative,
Social Justice taining integrity restoring justice design strategy

Value Realization
Intermediate Public Welfare, Realizing Value Removing value Prioritizing values
Moral Value Faithful Agency, conicts for trade os
Professional In-
tegrity, Peer
Collegiality

Table 2.5

Instructions for Using Problem Classication Table

1. Is your problem a conict? Moral versus moral value? Moral versus non-moral values? Non-moral
versus non-moral values? Identify the conicting values as concisely as possible. Example: In Toysmart,
the nancial values of creditors come into conict with the privacy of individuals in the data base:
nancial versus privacy values.
2. Is your problem a disagreement? Is the disagreement over basic facts? Are these facts observable? Is
it a disagreement over a basic concept? What is the concept? Is it a factual disagreement that, upon
further reection, changes into a conceptual disagreement?
3. Does your problem arise from an impending harm? What is the harm? What is its magnitude? What
is the probability that it will occur?

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36 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

4. If your problem is a value conict then can these values be fully integrated in a value integrating
solution? Or must they be partially realized in a compromise or traded o against one another?
5. If your problem is a factual disagreement, what is the procedure for gathering the required information,
if this is feasible?
6. If your problem is a conceptual disagreement, how can this be overcome? By consulting a government
policy or regulation? (OSHA on safety for example.) By consulting a theoretical account of the value
in question? (Reading a philosophical analysis of privacy.) By collecting past cases that involve the
same concept and drawing analogies and comparisons to the present case?

If you are having problems specifying your problem

• Try identifying the stakeholders. Stakeholders are any group or individual with a vital interest at stake
in the situation at hand.
• Project yourself imaginatively into the perspectives of each stakeholders. How does the situation look
from their standpoint? What are their interests? How do they feel about their interests?
• Compare the results of these dierent imaginative projections. Do any stakeholder interests conict?
Do the stakeholders themselves stand in conict?
• If the answer to one or both of these questions is "yes" then this is your problem statement. How does
one reconcile conicting stakeholders or conicting stakeholder interests in this situation?

Framing Your Problem

• We miss solutions to problems because we choose to frame them in only one way.
• For example, the Mountain Terrorist Dilemma is usually framed in only one way: as a dilemma, that
is, a forced decision between two equally undesirable alternatives. (Gilbane Gold is also framed as a
dilemma: blow the whistle on Z-Corp or go along with the excess polution.)
• Framing a problem dierently opens up new horizons of solution. Your requirement from this point on
in the semester is to frame every problem you are assigned in at least two dierent ways.
• For examples of how to frame problems using socio-technical system analysis see module m14025.
• These dierent frames are summarized in the next box below.

Dierent Frames for Problems

• Technical Frame: Engineers frame problems technically, that is, they specify a problem as raising a
technical issue and requiring a technical design for its resolution. For example, in the Hughes case, a
technical frame would raise the problem of how to streamline the manufacturing and testing processes
of the chips.
• Physical Frame: In the Laminating Press case, the physical frame would raise the problem of how the
layout of the room could be changed to reduce the white powder. Would better ventilation eliminate
or mitigate the white powder problem?
• Social Frame: In the "When in Aguadilla" case, the Japanese engineer is uncomfortable working
with the Puerto Rican woman engineer because of social and cultural beliefs concerning women still
widely held by men in Japan. Framing this as a social problem would involve asking whether there
would be ways of getting the Japanese engineer to see things from the Puerto Rican point of view.
• Financial or Market-Based Frames: The DOE, in the Risk Assessment case below, accuses the
laboratory and its engineers of trying to extend the contract to make more money. The supervisor
of the head of the risk assessment team pressures the team leader to complete the risk assessment as
quickly as possible so as not to lose the contract. These two framings highlight nancial issues.
• Managerial Frame: As the leader of the Puerto Rican team in the "When in Aguadilla" case, you
need to exercise leadership in your team. The refusal of the Japanese engineer to work with a member
of your team creates a management problem. What would a good leader, a good manager, do in this
situation? What does it mean to call this a management problem? What management strategies would
help solve it?

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• Legal Frame: OSHA may have clear regulations concerning the white powder produced by laminating
presses. How can you nd out about these regulations? What would be involved in complying with
them? If they cost money, how would you get this money? These are questions that arise when you
frame the Laminating Press case as a legal problem.
• Environmental Framing: Finally, viewing your problem from an environmental frame leads you to
consider the impact of your decision on the environment. Does it harm the environment? Can this
harm be avoided? Can it be mitigated? Can it be oset? (Could you replant elsewhere the trees you cut
down to build your new plant?) Could you develop a short term environmental solution to "buy time"
for designing and implementing a longer term solution? Framing your problem as an environmental
problem requires that you ask whether this solution harms the environment and whether this harming
can be avoided or remedied in some other way.

2.2.5 Solution Generation

In solution generation, agents exercise moral creativity by brainstorming to come up with solution options
designed to resolve the disagreements and value conicts identied in the problem specication stage. Brain-
storming is crucial to generating nonobvious solutions to dicult, intractable problems. This process must
take place within a non-polarized environment where the members of the group respect and trust one another.
(See the module on the Ethics of Group Work for more information on how groups can be successful and
pitfalls that commonly trip up groups.) Groups eectively initiate the brainstorming process by suspending
criticism and analysis. After the process is completed (say, by meeting a quota), then participants can rene
the solutions generated by combining them, eliminating those that don't t the problem, and ranking them
in terms of their ethics and feasibility. If a problem can't be solved, perhaps it can be dissolved through
reformulation. If an entire problem can't be solve, perhaps the problem can be broken down into parts some
of which can be readily solved.
Having trouble generating solutions?

• One of the most dicult stages in problem solving is to jump start the process of brainstorming
solutions. If you are stuck then here are some generic options guaranteed to get you "unstuck."
• Gather Information: Many disagreements can be resolved by gathering more information. Because
this is the easiest and least painful way of reaching consensus, it is almost always best to start here.
Gathering information may not be possible because of dierent constraints: there may not be enough
time, the facts may be too expensive to gather, or the information required goes beyond scientic or
technical knowledge. Sometimes gathering more information does not solve the problem but allows for
a new, more fruitful formulation of the problem. Harris, Pritchard, and Rabins in Engineering Ethics:
Concepts and Cases show how solving a factual disagreement allows a more profound conceptual
disagreement to emerge.
• Nolo Contendere. Nolo Contendere is latin for not opposing or contending. Your interests may
conict with your supervisor but he or she may be too powerful to reason with or oppose. So your only
choice here is to give in to his or her interests. The problem with nolo contendere is that non-opposition
is often taken as agreement. You may need to document (e.g., through memos) that your choosing not
to oppose does not indicate agreement.
• Negotiate. Good communication and diplomatic skills may make it possible to negotiate a solution
that respects the dierent interests. Value integrative solutions are designed to integrate conicting
values. Compromises allow for partial realization of the conicting interests. (See the module, The
Ethics of Team Work, for compromise strategies such as logrolling or bridging.) Sometimes it may be
necessary to set aside one's interests for the present with the understanding that these will be taken
care of at a later time. This requires trust.
• Oppose. If nolo contendere and negotiation are not possible, then opposition may be necessary.
Opposition requires marshalling evidence to document one's position persuasively and impartially. It
makes use of strategies such as leading an "organizational charge" or "blowing the whistle." For more

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38 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

on whistle-blowing consult the discussion of whistle blowing in the Hughes case that can be found at
computing cases.
• Exit. Opposition may not be possible if one lacks organizational power or documented evidence. Nolo
contendere will not suce if non-opposition implicates one in wrongdoing. Negotiation will not succeed
without a necessary basis of trust or a serious value integrative solution. As a last resort, one may
have to exit from the situation by asking for reassignment or resigning.

Rening solutions

• Are any solutions blatantly unethical or unrealizable?

• Do any solutions overlap? Can these be integrated into broader solutions?
• Can solutions be brought together as courses of action that can be pursued simultaneously?
• Go back to the problem specication? Can any solutions be eliminated because they do not address
the problem? (Or can the problem be revised to better t what, intuitively, is a good solution.)
• Can solutions be brought together as successive courses of action? For example, one solution represents
Plan A; if it does not work then another solution, Plan B, can be pursued. (You negotiate the problem
with your supervisor. If she fails to agree, then you oppose your supervisor on the grounds that her
position is wrong. If this fails, you conform or exit.)
• The goal here is to reduce the solution list to something manageable, say, a best, a
second best, and a third best. Try adding a bad solution to heighten strategic points of
comparison. The list should be short so that the remaining solutions can be intensively
examined as to their ethics and feasibility.

2.2.6 Solution Testing: The solutions developed in the second stage must be
tested in various ways.
1. Reversibility: Is the solution reversible between the agent and key stakeholders?
2. Harm/Benecence: Does the solution minimize harm? Does it produce benets that are justly dis-
tributed among stakeholders?
3. Publicity: Is this action one with which you are willing to be publicly identied? Does it identify you
as a moral person? An irresponsible person? A person of integrity? An untrustworthy person?
4. Code: Does the solution violate any provisions of a relevant code of ethics? Can it be modied to be
in accord with a code of ethics? Does it address any aspirations a code might have? (Engineers: Does
this solution hold paramount the health, safety, and welfare of the public?)
5. Global Feasibility: Do any obstacles to implementation present themselves at this point? Are there
resources, techniques, and social support for realizing the solution or will obstacles arise in one or more
of these general areas? At this point, assess globally the feasibility of each solution.
6. The solution evaluation matrix presented just below models and summarizes the solution testing pro-
cess.

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Solution/Test Reversibility Harm/ Bene- Publicity/Values Code Global Feasi-

cence bility
Description Is the solution Does the so- Does the so- Does the so- Are there con-
reversible with lution produce lution express lution violate straints or ob-
stakeholders? the best bene- and integrate any code stacles to real-
Does it honor t/harm ratio? key virtues? provisions? izing the solu-
basic rights? Does the solu- tion?
tion maximize
utility?
Best solution
Second Best
Worst

Table 2.6

2.2.7 Solution Implementation

The chosen solution must be examined in terms of how well it responds to various situational constraints
that could impede its implementation. What will be its costs? Can it be implemented within necessary time
constraints? Does it honor recognized technical limitations or does it require pushing these back through
innovation and discovery? Does it comply with legal and regulatory requirements? Finally, could the
surrounding organizational, political, and social environments give rise to obstacles to the implementation
of the solution? In general this phase requires looking at interest, technical, and resource constraints or
limitations. A Feasibility Matrix helps to guide this process.
The Feasibility Tests focuses on situational constraints. How could these hinder the implementation of
the solution? Should the solution be modied to ease implementation? Can the constraints be removed or
remodeled by negotiation, compromise, or education? Can implementation be facilitated by modifying both
the solution and changing the constraints?

Feasibility Matrix
Resource Constraints Technical Constraints Interest Constraints
Personalities
Time Organizational
Cost Applicable Technology Legal
Materials Manufacturability Social, Political, Cultural

Table 2.7

Dierent Feasibility Constraints

1. The Feasibility Test identies the constraints that could interfere with realizing a solution. This test also
sorts out these constraints into resource (time, cost, materials), interest (individuals, organizations,
legal, social, political), and technical limitations. By identifying situational constraints, problem-
solvers can anticipate implementation problems and take early steps to prevent or mitigate them.
2. Time. Is there a deadline within which the solution has to be enacted? Is this deadline xed or
negotiable?

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40 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

3. Financial. Are there cost constraints on implementing the ethical solution? Can these be extended
by raising more funds? Can they be extended by cutting existing costs? Can agents negotiate for more
money for implementation?
4. Technical. Technical limits constrain the ability to implement solutions. What, then, are the technical
limitations to realizing and implementing the solution? Could these be moved back by modifying the
solution or by adopting new technologies?
5. Manufacturability. Are there manufacturing constraints on the solution at hand? Given time, cost,
and technical feasibility, what are the manufacturing limits to implementing the solution? Once again,
are these limits xed or exible, rigid or negotiable?
6. Legal. How does the proposed solution stand with respect to existing laws, legal structures, and
regulations? Does it create disposal problems addressed in existing regulations? Does it respond to
and minimize the possibility of adverse legal action? Are there legal constraints that go against the
ethical values embodied in the solution? Again, are these legal constraints xed or negotiable?
7. Individual Interest Constraints. Individuals with conicting interests may oppose the implemen-
tation of the solution. For example, an insecure supervisor may oppose the solution because he fears
it will undermine his authority. Are these individual interest constraints xed or negotiable?
8. Organizational. Inconsistencies between the solution and the formal or informal rules of an orga-
nization may give rise to implementation obstacles. Implementing the solution may require support
of those higher up in the management hierarchy. The solution may conict with organization rules,
management structures, traditions, or nancial objectives. Once again, are these constraints xed or
exible?
9. Social, Cultural, or Political. The socio-technical system within which the solution is to be imple-
mented contains certain social structures, cultural traditions, and political ideologies. How do these
stand with respect to the solution? For example, does a climate of suspicion of high technology threaten
to create political opposition to the solution? What kinds of social, cultural, or political problems could
arise? Are these xed or can they be altered through negotiation, education, or persuasion?

2.2.8 Ethics Tests For Solution Evaluation

Three ethics tests (reversibility, harm/benecence, and public identication) encapsulate three ethical ap-
proaches (deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics) and form the basis of stage three of the SDC, solution
testing. A fourth test (a value realization test) builds upon the public identication/virtue ethics test by
evaluating a solution in terms of the values it harmonizes, promotes, protects, or realizes. Finally a code test
provides an independent check on the ethics tests and also highlights intermediate moral concepts such as
safety, health, welfare, faithful agency, conict of interest, condentiality, professional integrity, collegiality,
privacy, property, free speech, and equity/access). The following section provides advice on how to use these
tests. More information can be found at www.computingcases.org.

2.2.9 Setting Up the Ethics Tests: Pitfalls to avoid

Set-Up Pitfalls: Mistakes in this area lead to the analysis becoming unfocused and getting lost in irrelevancies.
(a) Agent-switching where the analysis falls prey to irrelevancies that crop up when the test application is
not grounded in the standpoint of a single agent, (b) Sloppy action-description where the analysis fails
because no specic action has been tested, (c) Test-switching where the analysis fails because one test is
substituted for another. (For example, the public identication and reversibility tests are often reduced
to the harm/benecence test where harmful consequences are listed but not associated with the agent or
stakeholders.)
Set up the test

1. Identify the agent (the person who is going to perform the action)
2. Describe the action or solution that is being tested (what the agent is going to do or perform)

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3. Identify the stakeholders (those individuals or groups who are going to be aected by the action), and
their stakes (interests, values, goods, rights, needs, etc.
4. Identify, sort out, and weigh the consequences (the results the action is likely to bring about)

2.2.10 Harm/Benecence Test

• What harms would accompany the action under consideration? Would it produce physical or mental
suering, impose nancial or non-nancial costs, or deprive others of important or essential goods?
• What benets would this action bring about? Would it increase safety, quality of life, health, security,
or other goods both moral and non-moral?
• What is the magnitude of each these consequences? Magnitude includes likelihood it will occur (prob-
ability), the severity of its impact (minor or major harm) and the range of people aected.
• Identify one or two other viable alternatives and repeat these steps for them. Some of these may be
modications of the basic action that attempt to minimize some of the likely harms. These alternatives
will establish a basis for assessing your alternative by comparing it with others.
• Decide on the basis of the test which alternative produces the best ratio of benets to harms?
• Check for inequities in the distribution of harms and benets. Do all the harms fall on one individual
(or group)? Do all of the benets fall on another? If harms and benets are inequitably distributed,
can they be redistributed? What is the impact of redistribution on the original solution imposed?

Pitfalls of the Harm/Benecence Test

1. Paralysis of Analysis" comes from considering too many consequences and not focusing only on those
relevant to your decision.
2. Incomplete Analysis results from considering too few consequences. Often it indicates a failure of moral
imagination which, in this case, is the ability to envision the consequences of each action alternative.
3. Failure to compare dierent alternatives can lead to a decision that is too limited and one-sided.
4. Failure to weigh harms against benets occurs when decision makers lack the experience to make the
qualitative comparisons required in ethical decision making.
5. Finally, justice failures result from ignoring the fairness of the distribution of harms and benets. This
leads to a solution which may maximize benets and minimize harms but still give rise to serious
injustices in the distribution of these benets and harms.

2.2.11 Reversibility Test

1. Set up the test by (i) identifying the agent, (ii) describing the action, and (iii) identifying the stake-
holders and their stakes.
2. Use the stakeholder analysis to identify the relations to be reversed.
3. Reverse roles between the agent (you) and each stakeholder: put them in your place (as the agent)
and yourself in their place (as the one subjected to the action).
4. If you were in their place, would you still nd the action acceptable?

Cross Checks for Reversibility Test (These questions help you to check if you have carried out
the reversibility test properly.)

• Does the proposed action treat others with respect? (Does it recognize their autonomy or circumvent
it?)
• Does the action violate the rights of others? (Examples of rights: free and informed consent, privacy,
freedom of conscience, due process, property, freedom of expression)
• Would you recommend that this action become a universal rule?
• Are you, through your action, treating others merely as means?

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42 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

Pitfalls of the Reversibility Test

• Leaving out a key stakeholder relation

• Failing to recognize and address conicts between stakeholders and their conicting stakes
• Confusing treating others with respect with capitulating to their demands (Reversing with Hitler)
• Failing to reach closure, i.e., an overall, global reversal assessment that takes into account all the
stakeholders the agent has reversed with.

2.2.12 Steps in Applying the Public Identication Test

• Set up the analysis by identifying the agent, describing the action, and listing the key values or virtues
at play in the situation.
• Association the action with the agent.
• Describe what the action says about the agent as a person. Does it reveal him or her as someone
associated with a virtue or a vice?

Alternative Version of Public Identication

• Does the action under consideration realize justice or does it pose an excess or defect of justice?
• Does the action realize responsibility or pose an excess or defect of responsibility?
• Does the action realize reasonableness or pose too much or too little reasonableness?
• Does the action realize honesty or pose too much or too little honesty?
• Does the action realize integrity or pose too much or too little integrity?

Pitfalls of Public Identication

• Action not associated with agent. The most common pitfall is failure to associate the agent and the
action. The action may have bad consequences and it may treat individuals with respect but these
points are not as important in the context of this test as what they imply about the agent as a person
who deliberately performs such an action.
• Failure to specify moral quality, virtue, or value. Another pitfall is to associate the action and agent
but only ascribe a vague or ambiguous moral quality to the agent. To say, for example, that willfully
harming the public is bad fails to zero in on precisely what moral quality this ascribes to the agent.
Does it render him or her unjust, irresponsible, corrupt, dishonest, or unreasonable? The virtue list
given above will help to specify this moral quality.

2.2.13 Code of Ethics Test

• Does the action hold paramount the health, safety, and welfare of the public, i.e., those aected by the
action but not able to participate in its design or execution?
• Does the action maintain faithful agency with the client by not abusing trust, avoiding conicts of
interest, and maintaining condences?
• Is the action consistent with the reputation, honor, dignity, and integrity of the profession?
• Does the action serve to maintain collegial relations with professional peers?

2.2.14 Meta Tests

• The ethics and feasibility tests will not always converge on the same solution. There is a complicated
answer for why this is the case but the simple version is that the tests do not always agree on a
given solution because each test (and the ethical theory it encapsulates) covers a dierent domain or
dimension of the action situation. Meta tests turn this disadvantage to your advantage by feeding the
interaction between the tests on a given solution back into the evaluation of that solution.

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• When the ethics tests converge on a given solution, this convergence is a sign of the strength and
robustness of the solution and counts in its favor.
• When a given solution responds well to one test but does poorly under another, this is a sign that the
solution needs further development and revision. It is not a sign that one test is relevant while the
others are not. Divergence between test results is a sign that the solution is weak.

2.2.15 Application Exercise

You will now practice the four stages of decision making with a real world case. This case, Risk Assessment,
came from a retreat on Business, Science, and Engineering Ethics held in Puerto Rico in December 1998. It
was funded by the National Science Foundation, Grant SBR 9810253.
Risk Assessment Scenario
Case Scenario: You supervise a group of engineers working for a private laboratory with expertise in nuclear
waste disposal and risk assessment. The DOE (Department of Energy) awarded a contract to your laboratory
six years ago to do a risk assessment of various nuclear waste disposal sites. During the six years in which
your team has been doing the study, new and more accurate calculations in risk assessment have become
available. Your laboratory's study, however, began with the older, simpler calculations and cannot integrate
the newer without substantially delaying completion. You, as the leader of the team, propose a delay to the
DOE on the grounds that it is necessary to use the more advanced calculations. Your position is that the
laboratory needs more time because of the extensive calculations required; you argue that your group must
use state of the art science in doing its risk assessment. The DOE says you are using overly high standards
of risk assessment to prolong the process, extend the contract, and get more money for your company. They
want you to use simpler calculations and nish the project; if you are unwilling to do so, they plan to nd
another company that thinks dierently. Meanwhile, back at the laboratory, your supervisor (a high level
company manager) expresses to you the concern that while good science is important in an academic setting,
this is the real world and the contract with the DOE is in jeopardy. What should you do?
Part One: Problem Specication

1. Specify the problem in the above scenario. Be as concise and specic as possible
2. Is your problem best speciable as a disagreement? Between whom? Over what?
3. Can your problem be specied as a value conict? What are the values in conict? Are the moral,
nonmoral, or both?

Part Two: Solution Generation

1. Quickly and without analysis or criticism brainstorm 5 to ten solutions

2. Rene your solution list. Can solutions be eliminated? (On what basis?) Can solutions be combined?
Can solutions be combined as plan a and plan b?
3. If you specied your problem as a disagreement, how do your solutions resolve the disagreement? Can
you negotiate interests over positions? What if your plan of action doesn't work?
4. If you formulated your problem as a value conict, how do your solutions resolve this conict? By
integrating the conicting values? By partially realizing them through a value compromise? By trading
one value o for another?

Part Three: Solution Testing

1. Construct a solution evaluation matrix to compare two to three solution alternatives.

2. Choose a bad solution and then compare to it the two strongest solutions you have.
3. Be sure to avoid the pitfalls described above and set up each test carefully.

Part Four: Solution Implementation

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44 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

1. Develop an implementation plan for your best solution. This plan should anticipate obstacles and oer
means for overcoming them.
2. Prepare a feasibility table outlining these issues using the table presented above.
3. Remember that each of these feasibility constraints is negotiable and therefore exible. If you choose
to set aside a feasibility constraint then you need to outline how you would negotiate the extension of
that constraint.

Decision-Making Presentation

This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at

<Decision Making Manual V4.pptx>

Figure 2.1: Clicking on this gure will allow you to open a presentation designed to introduce problem
solving in ethics as analogous to that in design, summarize the concept of a socio-technical system, and
provide an orientation in the four stages of problem solving. This presentation was given February 28,
2008 at UPRM for ADMI 6005 students, Special Topics in Research Ethics.

Problem Solving Presentation

[Media Object]3
Shortened Presentation for Fall 2012
[Media Object]4
Vigo Socio-Technical System Table and Problems
[Media Object]5
Decision Making Worksheet

This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at

<Decision Making Worksheet.docx>

Figure 2.2: This exercise is designed to give you practice with the three frameworks described in this
module. It is based on the case, "When in Aguadilla."

Test Rubric Fall 2009: Problem-Solving

[Media Object] 6

3 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at

<Decision Making Manual V5.pptx>
4 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<Decision Making Manual V6.pptx>
5 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<Vigo STS.docx>
6 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<PE_Rubric_EO_S09.docx>

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7
2.3 Socio-Technical Systems in Professional Decision Making

2.3.1 Module Introduction

Milagro Beaneld War
Joe Mondragon has created quite a stir in Milagro, a small village in New Mexico. He has illegally diverted
water from the irrigation ditch to his eld to grow beans. Access to scarce water in New Mexico has created
sharp political and social disputes which have reached a crises point in Milagro. Competing with traditional
subsistence farmers like Joe is the protable recreation industry. Ladd Devine, a wealthy developer, has joined
with the state government in New Mexico to build a large recreational center consisting of a restaurant, travel
lodge, individual cabins and a lavish golf course. Since there is not enough water to cover both recreational
and agricultural uses and since Ladd Devine's project promises large tax revenues and new jobs, the state
government has fallen behind him and has promised to give to the recreational facilities all the water it
needs. Hence, the problem created by Mondragon's illegal act. You work for Ladd Devine. He has asked
you to look into local opposition to the recreational facility. Along these lines, you attend the town meeting
scheduled by Ruby Archuleta in the town's church. You are concerned about Charlie Bloom's presentation
and the impact it may have on the local community. Prepare a STS analysis to test Bloom's assertions and
better prepare Ladd Devine for local opposition to his facility.
Incident at Morales
Fred is a chemical engineer hired by Phaust Corporation to design and make operational a new chemical plant
for the manufacture of their newly redesigned paint thinner. Under nancial pressure from the parent French
company, Chemistre, they have decided to locate their new plant in Morales, Mexico to take advantage of
lower costs and more exible government regulations. You are well on the way toward designing this new
plant when news comes from Chemistre that all budgets are being cut 20% to nance Chemistre's latest
takeover acquisition. You are Fred and are now faced with a series of dicult nancial-engineering decisions.
Should you hold out for the more expensive Lutz and Lutz controls or use the cheaper ones produced
locally? Should you continue with the current plant size or cut plant size and capacity to keep within
budgetary constraints? You have also been made aware of the environmental and health risks associated
with not lining the waste ponds used by the plant. Do you advocate lining the ponds or not, the latter being
within compliance for Mexican environmental and health regulations. Prepare a STS analysis to help you
make and justify these decisions. Make a series of recommendations to your supervisors based on this study.
Puerto Rican Projects

• Your company, Cogentrix, proposes a cogeneration plant that uses coal, produces electricity, and creates
steam as a by-product of electricity generation process. Because the steam can be sold to nearby tuna
canning plants, your company wishes to study the feasibility of locating its plant in or near Mayaguez,
Puerto Rico. (Co-generation technology has become very popular and useful in some places.) Carry
out a STS analysis to identify potential problems. Make a recommendation to your company. If your
recommendation is positive, discuss how the plant should be modied to t into the Mayaguez, Puerto
Rico STS.
• Your company, Southern Gold Resources, is interested in mining dierent regions in central Puerto
Rico for copper and gold. But you know that twenty years earlier, two proposals by two international
mining companies were turned down by the PR government. Carry out a STS study to examine the
feasibility of designing a dierent project that may be more acceptable to local groups. What does your
STS analysis tell you about social and ethical impacts, nancial promise, and likely local opposition.
Can protable mining operations be developed that respect the concerns of opposed groups? What is
your recommendation based on your STS analysis?
• Windmar, a company that manufactures and operates windmills for electricity generation has proposed
to locate a windmill farm in a location adjacent to the Bosque Seco de Guanica. They have encountered
considerable local opposition. Carry out a STS analysis to understand and clarify this opposition. Can
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46 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

the concerns of local stakeholders be addressed and the windmill farm still remain protable? How
should the windmill project be modied to improve its chances of implementation?

2.3.2 Things to Know about STSs

What is a Socio-Technical System? (STS)
A socio-technical system (=STS) is a tool to help a business anticipate and successfully resolve interdisci-
plinary business problems. "Interdisciplinary business problems" refer to problems where nancial values
are intertwined with technical, ethical, social, political, and cultural values. (Reference: Chuck Hu, Good
Computing: A Virtue Approach to Computer Ethics, draft manuscript for Jones and Bartlett Publishers)
Some Things to Know About STSs

1. Socio-Technical systems provide a tool to uncover the dierent environments in which business activity
takes place and to articulate how these constrain and enable dierent business practices.
2. A STS can be divided into dierent components such as hardware software, physical surroundings, peo-
ple/groups/roles, procedures, laws/statutes/regulations, and information systems. Other components
include the natural environment, markets, and political systems.
3. But while dierent components can be distinguished, these are, in the nal analysis, inseparable. Socio-
Technical Systems are rst and foremost systems: their components are interrelated and interact so
that a change in one often produces changes that reverberate through the system.
4. Socio-Technical systems embody moral values such as justice, responsibility, respect, trust, and integrity
as well as non-moral values such as eciency, satisfaction, productivity, eectiveness, and protability.
Often these values can be located in one or more of the system components. Often they conict with
one another causing the system as a whole to change.
5. STSs change, and this change traces out a path or trajectory. The normative challenge here is to bring
about and direct changes that place the STS on a value-positive trajectory. In the nal analysis, we
study STS to make sure that they change in a value-realizing direction.

2.3.3 Constituents or Sub-Environments of Business Activity

Paragraph summary of sub-environments of business followed by a table devoted to each one.

• Technology including hardware, software, designs, prototypes, products, or services. Examples of

engineering projects in Puerto Rico are provided in the PR STS grid. In the Therac-25 case, the
hardware is the double pass accelerator, in Hughes the analogue-to-digital integrated circuits, and in
Machado the UNIX software system and the computers in the UCI laboratories that are congured by
this system. Because technologies are structured to carry out the intentions of their designers, they
embed values.
• Physical Surroundings. Physical surroundings can also embed values. Doors, by their weight,
strength, material, size, and attachments (such as locks) can promote values such as security. Physical
surroundings promote, maintain, or diminish other values in that they can permit or deny access,
facilitate or hinder speech, promote privacy or transparency, isolate or disseminate property, and
promote equality or privilege.
• People, Groups, and Roles. This component of a STS has been the focus of traditional stakeholder
analyses. A stakeholder is any group or individual which has an essential or vital interest in the
situation at hand. Any decision made or design implemented can enhance, maintain, or diminish this
interest or stake. So if we consider Frank Saia a decision-maker in the Hughes case, then the Hughes
corporation, the U.S. Air Force, the Hughes sub-group that runs environmental tests on integrated
circuits, and Hughes customers would all be considered stakeholders.

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• Procedures. How does a company deal with dissenting professional opinions manifested by employees?
What kind of due process procedures are in place in your university for contesting what you consider to
be unfair grades? How do researchers go about getting the informed consent of those who will be the
subjects of their experiments? Procedures set forth ends which embody values and legitimize means
which also embody values.
• Laws, statutes, and regulations all form essential parts of STSs. This would include engineering
codes as well as the state or professional organizations charged with developing and enforcing them
• The nal category can be formulated in a variety of ways depending on the specic context. Computing
systems gather, store, and disseminate information. Hence, this could be labeled data and data
storage structure. (Consider using data mining software to collect information and encrypted and
isolated les for storing it securely.) In engineering, this might include the information generated as
a device is implemented, operates, and is decommissioned. This information, if fed back into rening
the technology or improving the design of next generation prototypes, could lead to uncovering and
preventing potential accidents. Electrical engineers have elected to rename this category, in the context
of power systems, rates and rate structures.

Technological Component

Component Description Examples Frameworks More Frame-

works

Technological Hardware: Ma- Door (with tasks Value Discovery Social

chines of dierent delegated to it (identifying and Constructionism>:
kinds such as automati- locating values in Restoring inter-
cally shutting and STS) pretive exibility
being locked) to reconstruct
a technology to
remove bias and
realize value
Code that con- Power generating Value Translation Identifying and
gures machines technologies based (Operationalizing mitigating com-
around human on renewable and and implementing plexity in the
purposes nonrenewable values in a STS form of tightly-
resources by designing and coupled systems
carrying out a and non-linear
procedure) causal chains
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48 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

Technology can Automobiles, com- Value Verication De-centralizing

constrain busi- puters, cell phones (Using methods control and au-
ness activity by all of which have of participatory thority
de-skilling produced pro- observation to
found changes in determine how
our STSs eectively val-
ues have been
realized.)
Technology, es- Microsoft Oce, TransperspectivityDesigning
: to avoid
pecially software, Firefox Browser, discovering the technological
can instrument Google Chrome, strands of con- imperative and
human action Google Docs, struction of reverse adaptation
Social Networking current STS; iden- (where humans
software tifying possibilities abandon ends and
for reconstruction serve the ends of
technologies

Table 2.8 : Technological component of STS

Table 2: Ethical and Social Component

Component Description Examples Frameworks More Frame-

works

Ethical Envi- Moral Con- Basic Moral Utilitarianism: Basic Capabili-

ronment structs: Spheres Concepts: rights, Happiness is tied ties: life, bodily
of justice where duties, goods, to maximizing health, bodily in-
distribution takes values, virtues, the satisfaction tegrity
place according to responsibility, and of aggregated
context-dependent justice preferences.
rules (Rules)
Social Con- Intermediate Rights: Capaci- Cognitive Ca-
structs: Power Moral Con- ties of action that pabilities: Sense,
and its distribu- cepts: Privacy, are essential to Imagination,
tion among groups Property, In- autonomy, vulner- Thought; Emo-
and individuals formed Consent, able to standard tion; Practical
Free Speech, threats, and corre- Reason
due Process, lated with feasible
Safety/Risk duties
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 49

Right: A right Privacy: If the Virtues: Set- Social Capabili-

is a capacity of information is tled dispositions ties: Aliations,
action, essential directly relevant toward choosing Other Species
to autonomy, that to the relation to the mean between
others are obliged the holder and the extremes of ex-
to recognize and seeker, then it is cess and defect.
respect. not private. (Courage is the
mean between
cowardice and
recklessness)
Duty: A duty Property: That Capabilities Capabilities
is a principle that with which I Approach: For that address
obliges us to rec- mix my labor is Nussbaum, capa- vulnerabilities:
ognize and respect mine. Intellec- bilities answer the Play and Con-
the rights of oth- tual property is question, What trol over one's
ers. non-rivalrous and is this person able environment
non-excludable. to do or be? For
Sen, capabilities
are  `substan-
tial freedoms,' a
set of (causally
interrelated) op-
portunities to
choose and act.

Table 2.9 : Ethical Environments of the socio-technical system

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50 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

Physical Surroundings

Physical Sur- Description Examples Frameworks Frameworks

roundings

Physical envi- Inuence of rivers, Classroom envi- The physical

ronment imposes mountains, and ronment enables arrangement of
constraints (lim- valleys on social or constrains objects in the
its) over actions and economic dierent teach- classroom as well
that restrict possi- activities such ing and learning as the borders
bilities and shape as travel, trade, styles. For ex- created by walls,
implementation. economic and ample, one can doors, and cubicles
agricultural ac- pair o technically can steer a class
tivity, commerce, enhanced and toward teacher-
industry, and technically chal- centered or
manufacturing. lenged classrooms student-centered
with student- pedagogical styles.
centered and
teacher-centered
pedagogical styles
and come up
with four dierent
learning envi-
ronments. Each
constrains and
enables a dierent
set of activities.

Table 2.10: This table summarizes the physical environment of the STS and how it can constrain or enable
action.

People, Groups, and Roles (Stakeholders)

Stakeholders Description Examples Frameworks Frameworks

Any group or in- Market Stake- Non-Market Role: The place

dividual that has holders: Employ- Stakeholders: or station a stake-
a vital interest at ees, Stockholders communities, ac- holder occupies
play (at stake) in tivist groups and in a given orga-
the STS. NGOs nizational system
and the asso-
ciated tasks or
responsibilities.
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 51

customers, sup- business support Interests: Goods,

pliers retail- groups, govern- values, rights,
ers/wholesalers, ments, general interests, and
creditors public (those im- preferences at
pacted by projects play in the situ-
who do not par- ation which the
ticipate directly in stakeholder will
their development act to protect or
promote.
(Distinction be- Alliances are Relation: Each
tween market and discussed by Pa- stakeholder is
non-market stake- tricia Werhane related to other
holders comes et al., Allevi- stakeholders in an
from Lawrence ating Poverty alliance and each
and Weber, Through Prof- relation is tied to
Business and itable Partner- goods and values.
Society: Stake- ships: Global-
holders, Ethics, ization, Mar-
Public Policy, kets, and Eco-
12th edition. nomic Well-
McGraw-Hill, being. Routledge
14-15. (2009).

: This table shows the social or stakeholder environment of the STS. A stakeholder is any group
Table 2.11

or individual that has a vital interest at play in the STS.

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52 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

Procedural Environment

Procedural Description Examples Framework Framework

A series of interre- Hiring a new em- Value Realiza- Challenging the

lated actions car- ployee: (a) settling tion Process Statement of
ried out in a par- on and publishing in Software En- Values: (a) A
ticular sequence to a job description; gineering: (a) stakeholder group
bring about a de- (b) soliciting and Discovery: Un- raises a concep-
sired result, such reviewing ap- covering values tual, translation,
as the realization plications from shared by a given range, or devel-
of a value. Proce- candidates; (c) community; (b) opment issue; (b)
dures can schema- reducing can- Translation: op- Group presents
tize value by set- didate list and erationalizing and their challenge and
ting out a script interviewing nal- implementing val- response to other
for its realization. ists; (d) selecting ues in a given STS; stakeholders; (c) If
a candidate; (e) (c) Verication: other stakeholder
tendering that using methods of groups agree, then
candidate a job participatory ob- the challenge leads
oer.Other proce- servation (surveys to a revision in
dures: forming a and interviews) the SOV; (d)
corporation, ling to validate that Community as a
for bankruptcy, the values in ques- whole approves
gaining consent tion have been the revision.
to transfer TGI discovered and
and PII to a third translated.
party (Toysmart:
opt-in and opt-out
procedures).

Table 2.12

Legal Environment: Laws, Statutes, Regulations

Laws, Statutes, Description Examples Frameworks Frameworks

Regulations

Laws dier from Criminal Law: Civil Law: Torts US and British law
ethical principles Applies to indi- concern wrongful work through a
and concepts in viduals; interested injury. The ob- common law sys-
that laws prescribe party in a criminal jective of a tort is tem where current
the minimally trial is society, not to make the vic- decisions are based
moral while ethi- the victim. tim "while" after on past decisions
cal principles and an injury. or precedent.
concepts routinely
explore higher
moral "spaces."
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 53

Ethical princi- Involves proving a To prevail in a The Puerto Rican

ples challenge mens rea (guilty tort one ust prove system of law
and criticize laws mind) and actus (in order of sever- is based on the
by bringing into reus (guilty or ity) negligence, Napoleonic code
question their nor- law-breaking act) recklessness, or where decisions
mative content. and that the mens intent. relate directly
rea caused the to existing law
actus reus. and statute and
precedent plays a
weaker role.
Laws can challenge Criminal law does Negligence in- Question: How
ethical principles not apply to cor- volves proving does the statute-
and concepts by porations because that the defendant based Napoleonic
raising issues of they "have no failed to meet system in PR con-
practicality. Also, soul to damn and some standard of strain and enable
as in responsibility no body to kick" due care. business practice
theory, the law Baron Thurlow in relation to other
can structure and systems such as
inform the moral the British and
discussion. American common
law systems?
Contract law con-
cerns the violation
of the terms of a
contract.

Table 2.13

Market Environment

Market Envi- Description Examples Frameworks Frameworks

ronment

Business takes Laissez Faire: Assumptions of Recent eco-

place within dier- Each economic a Free Market nomic studies
ent markets that unit makes choice System: (a) In- of the limits
shape supply, de- based on ratio- dividual decisions of laissez faire
mand, and price. nal (enlightened) are aggregated. markets:
Globalization fre- self-interest. (Pri- (b) Information
quently requires vate ownership of ows through
that a business be goods.) price structure.
adept at operating
across dierent
markets
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54 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

Liberal use made Liberal Demo- (c) Free associa- (a) Information
here of notes from cratic Socialism: tion. (d) Ab- Asymmetries
Economics class Limited govern- sence of force or (as studied by
taught by CR ment intervention fraud. (e) Individ- Stiegliz). (b) Mo-
Winegardner, Uni- is needed to im- ual agents are ra- nopolies which,
versity of Toledo, prove upon the tional utility max- in the absence of
1971-1972 choice of indi- imizer competition, can
vidual economic dictate standards
units. (Mixture of of price, product
private and public and service.
ownership)
Materials also Communist, (f) Governments Animal spirits
take from Nat- Authoritarian should adopt a deect economic
ural Capitalism Socialism: The hands-o stance decision-making
from Lovins and state is in the because interfer- away from perfect
Hawkings. best position to ence disrupts the utility maximiz-
know what choices ability of mar- ing. They include
and policies are kets to produce condence, fair-
benecial for the utility-maximizing ness, corruption,
economy as a conditions.(4,4) money illusion,
whole and its and stories.(4,5)
component parts.
(Public ownership
of goods and
services)
(5,1) (5,2) (5,3) (5,4) Ghoshal: bad
management theo-
ries are destroying
good mange-
ment practices as
they become self-
fullling prophe-
cies. Ghoshal is
especially crit-
ical of agency
theory, compli-
ance/punitive
approaches to cor-
porate governance,
and the theory of
human nature
he calls "Homo
Economicus."(5,5)

Table 2.14

Information Environment: Collecting, Storing, and Transferring Information

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 55

Information En- Description(1,2) Examples(1,3) Frameworks(1,4) Frameworks(1,5)

vironment(1,1)

(2,1) How data and in- Informed Con- Privacy in Con- Data Transfer
formaiton is col- sent: Obtaining text (2,4) and Informed
lected, stored, and consent from in- Consent(2,5)
transmitted along formation holder
with ethical issues when collecting,
such as informed storing, and trans-
consent and pri- ferring personal
vacy that accom- identifying infor-
pany information mation or trans-
management (2,2) action generated
information.(2,3)
(3,1) (3,2) Belmont Re- (a) Identify indi- Opt-in: Infor-
port: (a) Princi- viduals in groups mation is not
ples: Respect for in a context; (b) transferred unless
persons, bene- Identify the roles data-holder ex-
cence, and justice; played by these pressly consents;
(b) Application individuals and Opt-out: Data
1: Informed con- groups.(3,4) will be transferred
sent as "subjects unless holder
to the degree expressly refuses
that they are or withdraws
capable be given consent.(3,5)
the opportunity
to choose what
shall or shall not
happen to them;"
(c) Application
2: assessment of
risks and benets;
(d) Application
3: Selection
of subjects for
experiment.(3,3)
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56 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

(4,1) (4,2) Conditions of (c) Identify Fair Informa-

Informed Con- context-relative tion Practices:
sent Information, norms that guide (a) Notice: full
Comprehen- activities within disclusure and
sion, Voluntari- context and be- redress (way to
ness.(4,3) tween one context resolve prob-
and another. (Ma- lems); (b) Choice:
terials on privacy Choice about how
in context are informaitn is to be
taken from Helen used; (c) Access:
Nissembaum in access to stored
her book, Privacy and about to be
in Context(4,4) disclosed informa-
tion; (d) Security:
ways that informa-
tion will be kept
secure and unau-
thorized access
prevented incol-
lection, storage,
and transfer of
information.(4,5)

Table 2.15

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 57

System of the Natural Environment

Natural Envi- Description(1,2) Examples(1,3) Frameworks(1,4) Frameworks(1,5)

ronment(1,1)

(2,1) Wicked Prob- Principles of Four Theoreti- Environmental

lems(2,2) Systainability cal Approaches Value as de-
according to B. to Environmen- termined by
Norton(2,3) tal Ethics(2,4) shadow mar-
kets(2,5)

(3,1) (a) Diculties Precautionary (a) Exten- Willingness-to-

in formulating Principle: "in sionism: Peter pay: Resource in
and structuring situations of high Singer's extension question would
problem; (b) Non- risk and high of Utilitarianism go to the highest
compatibility of uncertainty,always to cover sentient bidder, that is,
solutions (several choose the lowest beings; (b) Tom value is dependent
ways of stating risk option." (Cass Regan's ascription on most intense
solutions).(3,2) Sunstein distin- of rights to select preference and the
guishes several animals. Biocen- disposable income
senses of the PP trism: Taylor's to assert that
including one attribution of preference(3,5)
which makes it im- moral consid-
possible to deviate eration to all
from the status teleological centers
quo) (Norton of a life.(3,4)
348)(3,3)
(4,1) (c) Wicked prob- Safe Minimum Land Ethics: A Willingness-to-
lems are "non- Standard: "save thing has value or sell: Resource
repeatable" in that the resource, pro- is good insofar as is owned by the
they are context- vided the costs it promotes the public so its value
dependent. This of doing so are integrity, stability, is determined by
renders learning bearable" (Norton and beauty of the its selling rather
from previous 346)(4,3) biotic community. than buying price.
problems and Biotic commu- This frees bid
solutions much nity includes fromdisposable
more dicult; (d) humans, non- income. Now
Wicked problems humans, species, value becomes
involve "compet- and ecosystems more reective
ing values" that all interacting as of the identity-
cannot be realized a system. From conferring beliefs
at the same time Aldo Leopole, and attitudes of a
and that cannot Sand County Al- community and its
be homogenized or manac; Virtue members.(4,5)
plotted on a single Environmental
scale; (e) Wicked Ethics: Approach
problems ex- centers on virtues
hibit "open-ended as habits that pro-
inter-temporal mote sustainable
eects". Closely transactions with
paraphrased the natural envi-
from Norton, ronment. Hurst-
Systainability, house provides
133-5(4,2) a provocative
example with the
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virtue, respect for
nature.(4,4)
58 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

Table 2.16

2.3.4
Ethics of STS Research

• Right of Free and Informed Consent: This is the right of participants in a research project to
know the harms and benets of the research. It also includes the right not to be forced to participate
in a project but, instead, oer or withdraw voluntarily their consent to participate. When preparing
a STS analysis, it is mandatory to take active measures to facilitate participants's free and informed
consent.
• Any STS analysis must take active measures to recognize potential harms and minimize or eliminate
them. This is especially the case regarding the information that may be collected about dierent
individuals. Special provisions must be taken to maintain condentiality in collecting, storing, and
using sensitive information. This includes careful disposal of information after it is no longer needed.

2.3.5 Participatory Observation

• As we said above, a socio-technical system (STS) is an intellectual tool to help us recognize patterns
in the way technology is used and produced. Constructing these tools requires combining modes of
analysis that are ordinarily kept separate. Because STSs embed values, they are normative. These
values can help to chart out trajectories of change and development because they outline values that
the system needs to realize, maintain, or even enhance. In this way, the study of STSs is normative and
a legitimate inquiry for practical and professional ethics. On the other hand, STS analysis requires
nding out what is already there and describing it. So STS analysis is descriptive as well. In this
textbox, we will talk briey about the descriptive or empirical components of STS analysis. This
material is taken from the draft manuscript of Good Computing: A Virtue Approach to Computer
Ethics and has been developed by Chuck Hu.
• Interviews: Semi-Structured and Structured Interviews conducted with those familiar with a given
STS provide an excellent source of information on the constituents of a given STS and how these t
together into an interrelated whole. For example, the STS grid on power systems was put together
by experts in this area who were able to provide detailed information on power rates and protocols,
software used to distribute energy through the gridlines, and dierent sources (representing both hard
and soft technologies) of power generation.
• Field Observation: Those constructing a STS analysis go directly to the system and describe it in
its day-to-day operation. Two books provide more information on the types and techniques of eld
observation: 1. David M. Fetterman, Ethnography: 2nd Edition, Applied Social Research Methods
Series, Vol 17. London, UK.: Sage Publishers, 1998 and 2. James P. Spradley, Participant Observation.
New York, Harcourt, 1980. The data collected in this method can also be used to construct day-in-
the-life scenarios that describe how a given technology functions on a typical day. These scenarios
are useful for uncovering value conicts and latent accidents. See James T. Reason, Human Error,
Cambridge, UK.: Cambridge University Press, 1990 for information on latent accidents, how they are
detected, and how they are prevented.
• Questionnaires: Questionnaires are useful for gathering general information from large numbers of
people about a STS. Constructing good questionnaires is a dicult process that requires patience as
well as trial and error. (Trying out questions on classmates and friends is the best way to identify
unclear or misleading questions.) Avoiding complex, overly leading, and loaded questions represent a
few of the challenges facing those who would construct useful questionnaires.
• Archival and physical trace methods: Looking at user manuals provides insight into how a system
has been designed and how it works. Studying which keys are worn down on computer keyboards
provides information on the kind of work being done. Comparing how a system is intended to work

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 59

with how it is in fact being used is also illuminating, especially when one is interested in tracing the
trajectory of a STS. Working with archival and physical trace methods requires critical thought and
detective work.
• None of the above methods, taken in isolation, provides complete information on a STS. Triangulation
represents the best way to verify data and to reconcile conicting data. Here we generate evidence and
data from a variety of sources then compare and collate. Claims made by interviewees that match direct
on-site observations conrm one another and indicate data strength and veracity. Evidence collected
through questionnaires that conicts with evidence gathered through archival research highlights the
need for detective work that involves further observation, comparison, interpretation, and criticism.
• Developing STS analyses bears a striking resemblance to requirements analysis. In both cases, data
is collected, rened, and put together to provide an analysis. A key to success in both is the proper
combination of normative and descriptive procedures.

2.3.6 Exercise 1: Make a Table that Describes the Socio-Technical System

Directions: Identify the constituents of the Socio-Technical System. Use the broad categories
to prompt you.

1. What are the major hardware and software components?

2. Describe the physical surroundings.
3. What are the major people groups or roles involved?
4. Describe any procedures in the STS.
5. Itemize the laws, statutes, and regulations.
6. Describe the data and data structures in your STS. Use the two templates below that ll in this table
for energy generation systems and for engineering ethics in Puerto Rico.

Socio Technical System Table

Hard- Software Physical People, Procedures Laws Data

ware Sur- Groups, and Data
round- Roles Struc-
ings tures

Table 2.17

2.3.7 Exercise 2: Identify Value Mismatches in the STS

Directions: identify the values embedded in the STS. Use the table below to suggest possible
values as well as the locations in which they are embedded.

1. Integrity: "Integrity refers to the attributes exhibited by those who have incorporated moral values
into the core of their identities. Such integration is evident through the way values denoting moral ex-
cellence permeate and color their expressions, actions, and decisions. Characteristics include wholeness,
stability, sincerity, honesty to self and others, suthenticity, and striving for excellence.

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60 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

2. Justice: Justice as fairness focuses on giving each individual what is his or her due. Three senses of jus-
tice are (1) the proper, fair, and proportionate use of sanctions, punishments and disciplinary measures
to enforce ethical standards (retributive justice), (2) the objective, dispassionate, and impartial distri-
bution of the benets and burdens associated with a system of social cooperation (distributive justice),
(3) an objectively determined and fairly administered compensation for harms and injustices suered
by individuals (compensatory justice), and (4) a fair and impartial formulation and administration of
rules within a given group.
3. Respect: Respecting persons lies essentially in recognizing their capacity to make and execute decisions
as well as to set forth their own ends and goals and integrate them into life plans and identities. Respects
underlies rights essential to autonomy such as property, privacy, due process, free speech, and free and
informed consent.
4. Responsibility: (Moral) Responsibility lies in the ability to identify the morally salient features of a
situation and then develop actions and attitudes that answer to these features by bringing into play
moral and professional values. Responsibility includes several senses: (1) individuals are responsible in
that they can be called upon to answer for what they do; (2) individuals have responsibilities because
of commitments they make to carrying out the tasks associated with social and professional roles; (3)
responsibility also refers to the way in which one carries out one's obligations (This can range from
indierence to others that leads to minimal eort to high care for others and commitment to excellence)
5. Free Speech: Free Speech is not an unlimited right. Perhaps the best place to start is Mill's argument
in On Liberty. Completely true, partially true, and even false speech cannot be censored, the latter
because censoring false speech deprives the truth of the opportunity to clarify and invigorate itself by
defending itself. Mill only allows for a limitation of free speech based on harm to those at which the
speech is directed. Speech that harms an individual (defamatory speech or shouting "re" in a crowded
theatre) can be censored out of a consideration of self-defense, not of the speaker, but of those who
stand to be harmed by the speech.
6. Privacy: If an item of information is irrelevant to the relation between the person who has the infor-
mation and the person sho seeks it, then that information is private. Privacy is necessary to autonomy
because control over information about oneself helps one to structure and shape one's relations with
others.
7. Property: According to Locke, we own as property that with which we have mixed our labor. Thomas
Jeerson argues that ideas are problematic as property because, by their very nature, they are shared
once they are expressed. They are also nonrivalrous and nonexclusive.

Drawing Problems from Embedded Values

• Changes in a STS (e.g., the integration of a new technology) produce value mismatches as the values
in the new component conict with those already existing within the STS. Giving laptops to children
produces a conict between children's safety requirements and the safety features embedded in laptops
as designed for adults.
• Changes within a STS can exaggerate existing value conicts. Using digitalized textbooks on laptop
computers magnies the existing conict concerning intellectual property; the balance between copy-
rights and educational dissemination is disrupted by the ease of copying and distributing digitalized
media.
• Changes in STS can also lead to long term harms. Giving laptops to children threatens environmental
harm as the laptops become obsolete and need to be safely disposed of.

Values Embedded in STS

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 61

Hard- Software Physical People, Procedures Laws Data

ware Sur- Groups, and Data
round- Roles Struc-
ings tures

Integrity

Justice

Respect

Responsibility
for
Safety

Free
Speech

Privacy

Intellectual
Property

Table 2.18

2.3.8 Using Socio-Technical System Grids for Problem Specication

The activity of framing is a central component of moral imagination. Framing a situation structures its
elements into a meaningful whole. This activity of structuring suggests both problems and solutions. Framing
a situation in dierent ways oers alternative problem specications and solution possibilities. Since skillful
framing requires practice, this part of the module suggests how socio-technical system tables can help provide
dierent frames for problem specication and solution generation.
Dierent Problem Frames

• Technical Frame: Engineers frame problems technically, that is, they specify a problem as raising a
technical issue and requiring a technical design for its resolution. For example, in the STS grid appended
below, the Burger Man corporation wishes to make its food preparation areas more safe. Framing this
technically, it would be necessary to change the designs of ovens so they are more accident-proof.
• Physical Frame: How can the Burger Man corporation redesign its restaurants as physical facilities
to make them more accessible? One way is to change the access points by, say, designing ramps to
make restaurants wheel chair accessible. Framing this as a physical problem suggests solutions based
on changing the physical structure and arrangement of the Burger Man STS.
• Social Frame: Burger Man as a corporation has stakeholders, that is, groups or individuals who have
an essential interest at play in relation to the corporation. For example, framing the problem of making
Burger Man more safe as a social problem might suggest the solution of integrating workplace safety
into worker training programs and conducting regular safety audits to identify embedded risks.
• Financial or Market-Based Frames: Burger Man is a for-prot corporation which implies that
it has certain nancial responsibilities. Consequently, Burger Man should be concerned with how to
provide safe, child-proof chairs and tables that do not cut unduly into corporate prots. But like the
legal perspective, it is necessary to conduct ethical and social framing activities to compensate for the
one-sidedness of nancial framing.
• Managerial Frame: Many times ethical problems can be framed as managerial problems where the
solution lies in changing managerial structures, reporting relations, and operating procedures. For
example, Burger Man may develop a specic procedure when a cashier nishes a shift and turns over
the cash register and its contents to another cashier. Burger Man may develop cleaning procedures
and routines to minimize the possibility of serving contaminated or spoiled food to customers.

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62 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

• Legal Frame: Burger Man may choose to frame its environmental responsibilities into developing
eective procedures for complying with OSHAA and EPA regulations. Framing a problem legally
certainly helps to identify eective and necessary courses of action. But, because the ethical and social
cannot be reduced to the legal, it is necessary to apply other frames to uncover additional risks not
suggested by the legal framing.
• Environmental Framing: Finally, how does Burger Man look from the environmental standpoint?
Does it consider environmental value (environmental health, safety, and integrity) as merely a side
constraint to be addressed only insofar as it interferes with realizing supposedly more important values
such as nancial values? Is it a value to be traded o with other values? (For example, Burger Man
may destroy the local environment by cutting down trees to make room for its latest restaurant but
it osets this destruction through its program of planting new trees in Puerto Rican tropical rain
forests.) Framing a problem as an environmental problem puts the environment rst and sets as a goal
the integration of environmental values with other values such as worker safety and corporate prots.

Burger Man Socio-Technical System Table

This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at

<Socio Technical System Grid for Business Ethics.docx>

Figure 2.3:Clicking on this gure will open as a Word le a STS table based on the ctional corporation,
Burger Man. Below are a list of problems suggested by the STS analysis.

2.3.9 Media File Uplinks

This module consists of two attached Media Files. The rst le provides background information on STSs.
The second le provides two sample STS grids or tables. These grids will help you to develop specic STSs
to analyze cases in engineering, business, and computer ethics without having to construct a completely new
STS for each case. Instead, using the two tables as templates, you will be able to zero in on the STS that
is unique to the situation posed by the case. This module also presents background constraints to problem-
solving in engineering, business, and computer ethics. These constraints do not dier absolutely from the
constituents of STSs. However, they pose underlying constraints that outline the feasibility of an ethical
decision and help us to identify obstacles that may arise when we attempt to implement ethical decisions.

Socio-Technical Systems

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<STS_Background_V3.doc>

Figure 2.4: Socio-Technical Systems: Constituents, Values, Problems, and Constraints.

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 63

STS Templates

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<STS_Templates.doc>

Figure 2.5: Two STSs, Power Engineering and the Puerto Rican Context of Engineering Practice.

Socio-Technical Environments Table

[Media Object] 8

References

1. Brincat, Cynthia A. and Wike, Victoria S. (2000) Morality and the Professional Life: Values at Work.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
2. Hu, Chuck and Jawer, Bruce, "Toward a Design Ethics for Computing Professionals in Social Issues
in Computing: Putting Computing in its Place, Hu, Chuck and Finholt, Thomas Eds. (1994)
New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc.
3. Solomon, Robert C. (1999) A Better Way to Think About Business: How Personal INtgrity Leads to
Corporate Success. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
4. Wike, Victoria S. (2001) "Professional Engineering Ethics Bahavior: A Values-based Approach," Pro-
ceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and
Exposition, Session 2461.

Bibliographical Information on Power STS

1. Acceptable Evidence: Science and Values in Risk Management, edited by Deborah G. Mayo and
Rachelle D. Hollander. London, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991.
2. K. S. Shrader-Frechette. Ethics and Energy in Earthbound: New Introductory Essays in Environ-
mental Ethics, 1st Edition, edited by Tom Regan. NY, NY: Random House, 1984.
3. Nancy G. Leveson. Safeware: System Safety and Computers. NY, NY: Addison-Wesley Publishing
Company, 1995.
4. Charles Perrow. Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies. North America, Basic Books,
1984.
5. Malcolm Gladwell. Blowup in The New Yorker, January 22, 1996: 32-36.
6. James Reason. Human Error. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1990.
7. Mark Sago. The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Law, and the Environment. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1988.

9
2.4 Ethical Decision Making in Engineering

The cases used in this module have been developed through NSF SBR-9810253 and UPRM ABET EAC
Workshops. Also to thanks to Jaime Rodriguez, a former MBA student at UPRM, for providing cases 1
and 2. This module represents a modication of the Gray Matters format developed by George Sammet.
For a more detailed description of the history of Gray Matters, see Whitbeck, Caroline. 1998. Ethics in
Engineering Practice and Research. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 176-181.)
8 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<STS2.pdf>
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64 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

Directions
Read the following scenarios and the accompanying solutions.

• Evaluate the alternatives in terms of the tests described below.

• Choose the one you think best or design your own solution if you believe you can do better.
• Summarize your results by lling in the solution evaluation matrix that apprears on the page following
the scenario. Notice that the rst column repeats the solution alternatives.
• Be prepared to present your matrix to the class. You will also provide the other groups in the class
with a copy of your matrix for their ethics portfolios

Solution Evaluation Tests

• REVERSIBILITY: Would I think this is a good choice if I were among those aected by it?
• PUBILICITY: Would I want to be publicly associated with this action through, say, its publication in
the newspaper?
• HARM/BENEFICENCE: Does this action do less harm than any of the available alternatives?
• FEASIBILITY: Can this solution be implemented given time, technical, economic, legal, and political
constraints?

Decision Making Scenarios and Exercises

This is an unsupported media type. To view, please see http://cnx.org/content/m14033/latest/Gray

Matters in Engineering.doc

Figure 2.6: This le contains four cases: When in Aguadilla...?, The Laminating Press Room, Prints
and Primos, and The Persistent Engineer.

Harm Test Set-Up

1. Identify the agent (=the person who will perform the action).
2. Describe the action (=what the agent is about to do).
3. Identify the stakeholders (individuals who have a vital interest at risk) and their stakes.
4. Identify, sort out, and weight the expected results or consequences.

Harm Test Pitfalls

• Paralysis of Actionconsidering too many consequences.

• Incomplete analysisconsidering too few results.
• Failure to weigh harms against benets.
• Failure to compare dierent alternatives.
• Justice failuresignoring the fairness of the distribution of harms and benets.

Reversibility Test Set-Up

• Identify the agent

• Describe the action
• Identify the stakeholders and their stakes

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 65

• Use the stakeholder analysis to select the relations to be reversed.

• Reverse roles between the agent (you) and each stakeholder: put them in your place (as the agent)
and yourself in their place (as the target of the action)
• If you were in their place, would you still nd the action acceptable?

Reversibility Pitfalls

• Leaving out a key stakeholder relation.

• Failing to recognize and address conicts between stakeholders and their conicting stakes.
• Confusing treating others with respect with capitulating to their demands (Reversing with Hitler).
• Failing to reach closure, i.e., an overall global reversal assessment that takes into account all the
stakeholders the agent has reversed with.

Public Identication Set-Up

• Set up the analysis by identifying the agent, describing the action under consideration, and listing the
key values or virtues at play in the situation.
• Associate the action with the agent.
• Identify what the action says about the agent as a person. Does it reveal him or her as someone
associated with a virtue/value or a vice?

Public Identication Pitfalls

• Action is not associated with the agent. The most common pitfall is failure to associate the agent and
the action. The action may have bad consequences and it may treat individuals with disrespect but
these points are not as important in the context of this test as what they imply about the agent as a
person who deliberately performs such an action.
• Failure to specify the moral quality, virtue, or value of the action that is imputed to the agent in the
test. To say, for example, that willfully harming the public is bad fails to zero in on precisely what
moral quality this attributes to the agent. Does it render him or her unjust, irresponsible, corrupt,
dishonest, or unreasonable?

10
2.5 Gray Matters for the Hughes Aircraft Case

2.5.1 Introduction
I. Introduction
The Hughes Aircraft Case involves a group of employees in charge of testing chips for weapons systems.
Because of the lengthy testing procedure required by the U.S. Defense Department, Hughes soon fell behind
schedule in delivering chips to customers. To get chips out faster, some Hughes middle level managers
began to put pressure on employees to pass chips that had failed tests or to pass them without testing.
The scenarios below consist of narratives that stop at the point of decision. Your job is to complete the
narrative by making a decision. Alternatives are provided to get the process started, but you may nd it
necessary to design your own solution. Ethics and feasibility tests help you to evaluate these alternatives
and even design new ones more to your liking. This format supercially resembles the Gray Matters exercise
used at Boeing Corporation. (More information on the history of Gray Matters can be found by consulting
Carolyn Whitbeck, Ethics in Engineering Practice, 1998, 176-182.) This version diers in being more open-
ended and more oriented toward giving you the opportunity to practice using ethical theory (which has been
encapsulated into ethics tests).
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66 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

2.5.2 Directions
II. Directions

• Read the following scenarios and the accompanying solutions

• Evaluate the alternatives in terms of the tests described below.
• Choose the one you think best or design your own solution if you believe you can do better.
• Summarize your results by lling in the solution evaluation matrix that appears on the page following
the scenario. Notice that the rst column repeats the solution alternatives.
• Be prepared to present your matrix to the class. You will also provide the other groups in the class
with a copy of your matrix for their ethics portfolios

Bibliographical Note
The six scenarios below were developed by Chuck Hu as Participant Perspectives. They were rst published
online through the Computing Cases website. (Computing Cases was developed through two National Science
Foundation grants, DUE-9972280 and DUE-9980768.) A revised version of these participant perspectives
has been published in the anthology, Whistleblowing: Perspectives and Experiences, edited by Reena
Raj and published in 2008 by the Icfai University Press, Nagarjuna Hills, Punjagutta, Hyderbad, India.
These materials can be found on pages 75-80.
Scenario One: Responding to Organizational Pressure
Frank Saia has worked at Hughes Aircraft for a long time. Now he is faced with the most dicult decisions of
his career. He has been having problems in the environmental testing phase of his microchip manufacturing
plant; the detailed nature of these tests has caused Hughes to be consistently late in delivering the chips to
customers. Because of the time pressure to deliver chips, Saia has been working to make the production of
chips more ecient without losing the quality of the product. Chips are manufactured and then tested, and
this provides two places where the process can bottle up. Even though you might have a perfectly ne chip
on the oor of the plant, it cannot be shipped without testing. And, since there are several thousand other
chips waiting to be tested, it can sit in line for a long time. Saia has devised a method that allows testers to
put the important chips, the hot parts, ahead of the others without disrupting the ow and without losing
the chips in the shue. He has also added a gross leak test that quickly tells if a chip in a sealed container
is actually sealed or not. Adding this test early in the testing sequence allows environmental testing to avoid
wasting time by quickly eliminating chips that would fail a more ne-grained leak test later in the sequence.
Because environmental testing is still falling behind, Saia's supervisors and Hughes customers are getting
angry and have begun to apply pressure. Karl Reismueller, the director of the Division of Microelectronics at
Hughes, has given Saia's telephone number to several customers, whose own production lines were shut down
awaiting the parts that Saia has had trouble delivering. His customers are now calling him directly to say
we're dying out here for need of parts. Frank Saia has discovered that an employee under his supervision,
Donald LaRue, has been skipping tests on the computer chips. Since LaRue began this practice, they have
certainly been more on time in their shipments. Besides, both LaRue and Saia know that many of the hot
parts are actually for systems in the testing phase, rather than for ones that will be put into active use. So
testing the chips for long-term durability that go into these systems seems unnecessary. Still, LaRue was
caught by Quality Control skipping a test, and now Saia needs to make a decision. Upper management has
provided no guidance; they simply told him to handle it and to keep the parts on time. He can't let LaRue
continue skipping tests, or at least he shouldn't let this skipping go unsupervised. LaRue is a good employee,
but he doesn't have the science background to know which tests would do the least damage if they were
skipped. He could work with LaRue and help him gure out the best tests to skip so the least harm is done.
But getting directly involved in skipping the tests would mean violating company policy and federal law.
Alternatives

1. Do nothing. LaRue has started skipping tests on his own initiative. If any problems arise, then LaRue
will have to take responsibility, not Saia, because LaRue was acting independently of and even against
Saia's orders.

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 67

2. Call LaRue in and tell him to stop skipping tests immediately. Then call the customers and explain
that the parts cannot be shipped until the tests are carried out.
3. Consult with LaRue and identify non essential chips or chips that will not be used in systems critical
to safety. Skipping tests on these chips will do the least damage.
4. Your solution. . ..

Scenario Two: Responding to Wrongdoing

Margaret Goodearl works in a supervisory position in the environmental testing group at Hughes Aircraft.
Her supervisor, Donald LaRue, is also the current supervisor for environmental testing. The group that
LaRue and Goodearl together oversee test the chips that Hughes makes in order to determine that they
would survive under the drastic environmental conditions they will likely face. Rigorous testing of the chips
is the ideal, but some chips (the hot chips) get in line ahead of others. Goodearl has found out that over
the last several months, many of these tests are being skipped. The reason: Hughes has fallen behind in the
production schedule and Hughes upper management and Hughes customers have been applying pressure to
get chip production and testing back on schedule. Moreover, LaRue and others feel that skipping certain
tests doesn't matter, since many of these chips are being used in systems that are in the testing phase, rather
than ones that will be put into active use. A few months after Margaret Goodearl started her new position,
she was presented with a dicult problem. One of the girls (the women and men in Environmental Testing
at Hughes), Lisa Lightner, came to her desk crying. She was in tears and trembling because Donald LaRue
had forcefully insisted that she pass a chip that she was sure had failed the test she was running. Lightner
ran the hermeticity test on the chips. The chips are enclosed in a metal container, and one of the questions
is whether the seal to that container leaks. From her test, she is sure that the chip is a leakerthe seal
is not airtight so that water and corrosion will seep in over time and damage the chip. She has come to
Goodearl for advice. Should she do what LaRue wants and pass a chip she knows is a leaker?
Alternatives

1. Goodearl should advise Lightner to go along with LaRue. He is her supervisor. If he orders to pass
the chip, then she should do so.
2. Goodearl should go to Human Resources with Lightner and le a harassment complaint against LaRue.
Skipping tests is clearly illegal and ordering an employee to commit an illegal act is harassment.
3. Goodearl and Lightner should blow the whistle. They should go to the U.S. defense department and
inform them of the fact that Hughes Aircraft is delivering chips that have either failed tests or have
not been tested.
4. Your solution. . ..

Scenario 3: Goodearl, Ibarra, and the AMRAAM Incident

Now that Goodearl had few sympathizers among upper management, she increasingly turned to Ruth Ibarra
in Quality assurance for support in her concerns about test skipping and the falsication of paperwork. One
day, Goodearl noticed that some AMRAAM chips with leak stickers were left on her project desk in the
environmental testing area. The leak stickers meant that the seal on the chips' supposedly airtight enclosure
had failed a test to see if they leaked. AMRAAM meant that the chips were destined to be a part of an
Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile. Goodearl knew that these parts could not be retested and
needed to be simply thrown away. So why was someone keeping them? She also knew that these were
ocially "hot parts" and that the company was behind schedule in shipping these parts. After consulting
with Ruth Ibarra, the two of them decided to do some sleuthing. They took the chips and their lot travelers
to a photocopy machine and made copies of the travelers with "failed" noted on the leak test. They then
replaced the chips and their travelers on the desk. Later that day, as Don LaRue passed the desk, Goodearl
asked Don LaRue if he knew anything about the chips. "None of your business," he replied. The chips
disappeared, and later the travelers showed up in company les with the "failed" altered to "passed." So,
Goodearl and Ibarra had clear evidence (in their photocopy of the "failed" on the traveler) that someone
was passing o failed chips to their customers. And these were important chips, part of the guidance system
of an air-to-air missile.

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68 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

Alternatives: Since they have clear evidence, Goodearl and Ibarra should blow the whistle.
Evaluate each of the following ways in which they could blow the whistle

1. Blow the whistle to Hughes' Board of Directors. In this way they can stop the test skipping but will
also be able to keep the whole aair in house.
2. Blow the whistle to the local news media. In this way they will shame Hughes into compliance with
the testing requirements.
3. Take the evidence to the U.S. Department of Defense, since they are the client and are being negatively
impacted by Hughes' illegal actions.
4. Some other mode of blowing the whistle. . ..

Solution Evaluation Matrix

Alternatives/TestsReversibility/Rights
Harm/Benets Virtue/Value Global Feasibil-
Test Test Test (Also Pub- ity Test (Imple-
licity) mentation Ob-
stacles)

Alternative One Evaluate Alt 1

(Worst Alterna- using reversibil-
tive) ity/rights test
Alternative Two Weigh harms
(Best among against benets
those given) for alt 2
Alternative What val-
Three ues/disvalues
are realized in alt
3?
Your Solution What obstacles
could hinder im-
plementation of
solution?

Table 2.19

2.5.3 Ethics Tests: Set Up and Pitfalls

III. Solution Evaluation Tests

• REVERSIBILITY: Would I think this is a good choice if I were among those aected by it?
• PUBILICITY: Would I want to be publicly associated with this action through, say, its publication in
the newspaper?
• HARM/BENEFICENCE: Does this action do less harm than any of the available alternatives?
• FEASIBILITY: Can this solution be implemented given time, technical, economic, legal, and political
constraints?

Harm Test Set-Up

• Identify the agent (=the person who will perform the action). Describe the action (=what the agent
is about to do).
• Identify the stakeholders (individuals who have a vital interest at risk) and their stakes.
• Identify, sort out, and weight the expected results or consequences.

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 69

Harm Test Pitfalls

• Paralysis of Actionconsidering too many consequences.

• Incomplete analysisconsidering too few results.
• Failure to weigh harms against benets.
• Failure to compare dierent alternatives.
• Justice failuresignoring the fairness of the distribution of harms and benets.

Reversibility Test Set-Up

• Identify the agent

• Describe the action
• Identify the stakeholders and their stakes
• Use the stakeholder analysis to select the relations to be reversed.
• Reverse roles between the agent (you) and each stakeholder: put them in your place (as the agent)
and yourself in their place (as the target of the action
• If you were in their place, would you still nd the action acceptable?

Reversibility Pitfalls

• Leaving out a key stakeholder relation.

• Failing to recognize and address conicts between stakeholders and their conicting stakes.
• Confusing treating others with respect with capitulating to their demands (Reversing with Hitler).
• Failing to reach closure, i.e., an overall global reversal assessment that takes into account all the
stakeholders the agent has reversed with.

Public Identication Set-Up

• Set up the analysis by identifying the agent, describing the action under consideration, and listing the
key values or virtues at play in the situation.
• Associate the action with the agent.
• Identify what the action says about the agent as a person. Does it reveal him or her as someone
associated with a virtue/value or a vice?

Public Identication Pitfalls

1. Action is not associated with the agent. The most common pitfall is failure to associate the agent and
the action. The action may have bad consequences and it may treat individuals with disrespect but
these points are not as important in the context of this test as what they imply about the agent as a
person who deliberately performs such an action.
2. Failure to specify the moral quality, virtue, or value of the action that is imputed to the agent in the
test. To say, for example, that willfully harming the public is bad fails to zero in on precisely what
moral quality this attributes to the agent. Does it render him or her unjust, irresponsible, corrupt,
dishonest, or unreasonable?

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70 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

Gray Matters in Hughes Exercises

This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at

<GM_Hughes_V2.doc>

Figure 2.7: These exercises present three decision points from Hughes, solution alternatives, summaries
of ethics and feasibility tests, and a solution evaluation matrix. Carry out the exercise by lling in the
solution evaluation matrix.

This timeline is taken from the Computing Cases website developed and maintained by Dr. Charles Hu at
St. Olaf College. Computing Cases is funded by the National Science Foundation, NSF DUE-9972280 and
DUE 9980768.

2.5.4
Time Line

1979 Ruth Ibarra begins working for Hughes Air-

craft company's Microelectronic Circuit Division
(Hughes MCD) in Newport Beach, CA
1981 Margaret Goodearl begins working for Hughes
MCD as a supervisor for assembly on the hybrid
production oor and as a supervisor in the hybrid
engineering lab
1984 Ibarra becomes supervisor for hybrid quality assur-
ance
1985 Goodearl asks Ibarra to look at errors in paper-
work, Ibarra brings errors to the attention of her
supervisors and was told to keep quiet. This begins
time period where Goodearl/Ibarra become aware
of problems in hybrid chip testing and paperwork.
1986 Goodearl becomes supervisor for seals processing in
the environmental testing area.
1986 False Claims Act (31 U.S. C 3729-3733) becomes
False Claims Reform Act of 1986 making it stronger
and easier to apply.
continued on next page

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 71

Oct. 1986 Goodearl/Ibarra report problems ot Hughes man-

agement, and, after the problems were not xed,
Goodearl/Ibarra reported the allegations of faulty
testing to the United States Department of Defense.
Jan 9, 1987 Earliest date that Hughes may have stopped ne-
glecting environmental screening tests.
1988 Ibarra leaves Hughes feeling that her job had been
stripped of all real responsibility.
March 1989 Goodearl is laid o from Hughes.
1995 Goodearl and her husband are divorced.

Table 2.20

Civil Suit Timeline

1990-1996 United States of America, ex rel. Taxpayers

Against Fraud, Ruth Aldred (was Ibarra), and Mar-
garet Goodearl v. Hughes Aircraft Company, Inc.
1990 Goodearl les wrongful discharge suit against
Hughes and a number of individual managers,
which was eventually dropped in favor of the civil
suit.
May 29, 1990 Thinking the government investigation was tak-
ing too much time, Goodearl/Aldred le civil suit
against Hughes under False Claims Reform Act of
1986 with the help of Taxpayers Against Fraud and
Washington law rm Phillips and Cohen.
December 1992 Under provisions of the FCA, the U.S. Department
of Justice Civil Division takes over the civil case.
Sep. 10, 1996 Hughes found guilty in civil trial. Pays U.S. Gov-
ernment 4,050,00 dollars and each relator 891,000
dollars plus a separate payment of 450,000 dollars
to cover attorney's fees, costs, and expenses.

Table 2.21

Criminal Suit Timeline

1991-1993 United States of America v. Hughes Aircraft Co.,

and Donald LaRue
December 13, 1991 After a lengthy investigation, the U.S. Department
of Defense charges Hughes and Donald A. LaRue
with a 51-count indictment accusing it of falsifying
tests of microelectronic circuits (criminal suit).
continued on next page

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72 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

June 15, 1992 Hughes found guilty of conspiring to defraud the

U.S. Government in crminal case, co-defendent
LaRUE acquitted following 4-week trial. Good-
earl/Aldred called as witnesses in trial. Hughes ap-
peals.
Oct. 29, 1992 Hughes ned 3.5 million in criminal trial decision.
December 2, 1993 Appellate court upholds 1992 criminal conviction
and sentence. Hughes appeals.

Table 2.22

2.5.5 Hughes Case Socio Technical System

Hughes Socio Technical System

Hardware/Software
Physical People, Procedures Laws and Data and
Surround- Roles, Regulations Data Struc-
ings Structures tures
Description Hybrid Battle con- Hughes Chip Test- Legally Lot Trav-
Chips ditions Microelec- ing: Tem- Mandated elors to
(circuitry under which tric Circuit perature Tests document
hermetically chips might Division Cycle, Con- chips
sealed in be used stant Ac-
metal or celeration,
ceramic Mechani-
packages in cal Shock,
inert gas Hermeticity
atmosphere (Fine and
Gross Leak),
P.I.N.D.
continued on next page

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 73

Analogue E-1000 at Department Hughes Whistle

to Digital Hughes of Defense Human Blower
Conversion (Clean (Oce of Resources Protection
Chips Room) Inspector Procedures Legislation
General) for Com-
plaints
Radar and Hughes Dissenting Qui Tam
Missile Quality Professional Lawsuit,
Guidance Control Opinions Civil Suit,
Systems Criminal
Suit
Individuals:
Reismueller,
Temple,
Saia,
LaRue,
Goodearl,
Ibarra/Aldren
Table 2.23

2.5.6 Responsible Dissent

Sources

• Computing Cases is the primary source for the material below on responsible dissent. It is based on
the materials for responsibly carrying out dissent and disagreement that was formerly posted at the
IEEE website. The IEEE has since taken this material down.
• The Online Ethics Center has also posted the IEEE material on responsible dissent. The origin of this
material as well as a thorough discussion of its content can be found in Carolyn Whitbek, Ethics in
Engineering Practice and Research: 2nd Edition, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2011. Chapter 7, "Workplace Rights and Responsibilities, pp. 227-269.
• Much of this material (IEEE Guidelines and a discussion of Dissenting Professional Opinion Guidelines)
can be found in Chapter 7 ("Averting the Conict at the Source")in the following: Stephen H., Unger,
Controlling Technology: Ethics and the Responsible Engineer: 2nd Edition, New York:
John Wiley and Sons, INC.

Generic Forms of Dissent

• Gather more information

• Nolo Contendere (Don't ght it. Go along.)
• Oppose diplomatically. Oer your supervisor alternatives to the wrong he or she has ordered.
• Oppose by confronting. Threaten to go over your supervisor's head or threaten to blow the whistle.
• Distance yourself. Ask to be transferred to another section to avoid being implicated in the wrong-
doing.
• Exit. Quit and do nothing or quit and blow the whistle.
• Document your position if your company has a Dissenting Professional Opinion process. If it
doesn't, work to have one implemented. By establishing your opposition, you distance yourself morally
from the wrong you have documented.
• Which one is right? Use your tests. Which does the best job of satisfying the three ethics tests of re-
versibility, harm, and publicity? Which does the best job with the ADEM values: justice, responsibility,
respect, trust, and integrity?

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74 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

Introduction to Circumstances of Compromise

The following presents the circumstances of compromise as laid down by Martin Benjamin in Splitting the
Dierence. (See below for complete reference.) Benjamin provides ve conditions that indicate when a
compromise may be necessary. But he also argues that integrity helps draw a line beyond which compromise
must not go. One should not sacrice basic beliefs that constitute one's personal identity or self system.
A good example of using integrity to draw the line on compromise can be found in the characterization of
Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. (See also the movie of the same name.) In the
preface to the play, Bolt explicitly presents what follows as an exercise in articulating and testing integrity.
Circumstances of Compromise

• Under these conditions it may be necessary to "split the dierence."

• Factual uncertainty
• Moral complexity.
• Continuing Cooperative Relationship
• Decision cannot be deferred
• Scarcity of Resources

More on Moral Complexity

Martin Benjamin in Splitting the Dierence quotes John Rawls on moral complexity: Diversity naturally
arises from our limited powers and distinct perspectives; it is unrealistic to suppose that all
our dierences are rooted in ignorance and perversity, or else in the rivalries that result from
scarcity. . ..Deep and unresolvable dierences on matters of fundamental signicance. . .[must
be acknowledged] as a permanent condition of human life.
Application of Circumstances of Compromise

• Factual Uncertainty. Where are the chips under consideration going? If they go to an essential
system in an operative technology, then their malfunctioning could lead to loss of life. If they go to a
non-essential system (like a prototype being tested) then maybe the testing process can be streamlined.
This may require compromise between Hughes management, chip-testing team, and customers.
• Moral Complexity: How should an employee like LaRue weigh his loyalty to supervisors and company
and his obligation to the public and client? Setting aside his harassment of Gooderal, is Saia's position
(or at least a part of it) morally defensible?
• Continuing cooperative relationship: How important should it be to Gooderal that she needs
to sustain her relationship with her supervisor, LaRue, for the long term? How important is it that
Hughes managers respond to dicult messages rather than attempt to "shoot the messenger." (Again,
thinking in terms of continuing cooperative relationship?)
• Decision cannot be deferred: Why is it impossible to defer the decision on whether to respond to
test skipping? This case poses several dicult constraints. How many of these can be "pushed back"
through negotiation? Could Saia use his newly found accessibility to customers to negotiate with them
an extension on the delivery deadlines?
• Scarcity of resources: How are the resources of time, personnel, and money scarce in this case?
Is there any way to push back these constraints by negotiating more time (extending deadlines for
delivering chips), personnel (bringing in additional people to test chips), and resources (developing
better tools to test chips more quickly). Could, for example, it be possible to transfer Hughes employees
from other areas to help out, temporarily, on chip testing?

Ethical Dissent

1. Establish a clear technical foundation.

2. Keep your arguments on a high professional plane, as impersonal and objective as possible, avoiding
extraneous issues and emotional outbursts.
3. Try to catch problems early, and keep the argument at the lowest managerial level possible.
4. Before going out on a limb, make sure that the issue is suciently important.

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5. Use (and help establish) organizational dispute resolution mechanisms.

6. Keep records and collect paper.
7. These items originate with the IEEE which has dropped them from their website.
They can be accessed through the link above with the Online Ethics Center; the list
there is more complete. The above is quoted from the Computing Cases website:
http://computingcases.org/case_materials/hughes/support_docs/whistleblowing/ethical_dissent.html.

Before Going Public

1. Make sure of your motivation.

2. Count your costs.
3. Obtain all the necessary background materials and evidence.
4. Organize to protect your own interests.
5. Choose the right avenue for your disclosure.
6. Make your disclosure in the right spirit.
7. These items come from the IEEE (see onlineethics link) and from the manuscript of Good Computing
by Chuck Hu, William Frey, and Jose Cruz.

Places to Go

1. Government Agencies
2. Judicial Systems
3. Legislators
4. Advocacy Groups
5. News Media
6. In Puerto Rico, laws 14 and 426 have been passed to protect those who would blow the whistle on
government corruption. The Ocina de Etica Gubernamental de Puerto Rico has a whistle blower's
hotline. See link above.

When to Blow the Whistle.

1. Serious and Considerable Harm

2. Notication of immediate supervisor.
3. Exhaustion of internal channels of communication/appeal.
4. Documented Evidence.
5. Likelihood of successful resolution.
6. When the rst three conditions are satised, whistle-blowing is morally permissible. (You may do
it but you are not required or obligated to do it.) This is because you have brought your concerns
before decision-makers, given them a chance to respond, and, in the face of their unwillingness to do
so, still nd the issue of great importance.
7. When all ve conditions are satised, then whistle-blowing becomes morally obligatory. In this
case, you have a moral duty to blow the whistle. Here, your duty is grounded in your responsibility to
inform those who are likely to be harmed by the wrongdoing.

References

1. Richard T. De George, "Ethical Responsibilities of Engineers in Large Organizations: The Pinto Case,"
in Ethical Issues in Engineering, ed. Deborah G. Johnson (1991) New Jersey: Prentice-Hall: 175-
186.
2. Carolyn Whitbeck (1998) Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research. U.K. Cambridge University
Press: 55-72 and 176-181.
3. Charles Harris, Michael Pritchard and Michael Rabins (2005) Engineering Ethics: Concepts and Cases,
3rd Ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth: 203-206.

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76 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

2.5.7 Hughes Dramatic Rehearsals

A note on dramatic rehearsals

• The notion of dramatic rehearsal comes from John Dewey's Human Nature and Moral Conduct.
An agent works through a solution alternative in the imagination before executing it in the real world.
The dramatic rehearsal tests the idea in a mental laboratory created by the moral imagination. Steven
Fesmire in his book, John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics (Indiana
University Press, 2003), provides a comprehensive interpretation of Dewey's suggestive idea.

2.5.7.1 Decision Point One

Decision Point One

• Frank Saia has worked at Hughes Aircraft for a long time. Now he is faced with the most dicult
decisions of his career. He has been having problems in the environmental testing phase of his microchip
manufacturing plant; the detailed nature of these tests has caused Hughes to be consistently late in
delivering the chips to customers.
• Because of the time pressure to deliver chips, Saia has been working to make the production of chips
more ecient without losing the quality of the product. Chips are manufactured and then tested, and
this provides two places where the process can bottle up. Even though you might have a perfectly
ne chip on the oor of the plant, it cannot be shipped without testing. And, since there are several
thousand other chips waiting to be tested, it can sit in line for a long time. Saia has devised a method
that allows testers to put the important chips, the hot parts, ahead of the others without disrupting
the ow and without losing the chips in the shue. He has also added a gross leak test that quickly
tells if a chip in a sealed container is actually sealed or not. Adding this test early in the testing
sequence allows environmental testing to avoid wasting time by quickly eliminating chips that would
fail a more ne-grained leak test later in the sequence.
• Because environmental testing is still falling behind, Saia's supervisors and Hughes customers are
getting angry and have begun to apply pressure. Karl Reismueller, the director of the Division of
Microelectronics at Hughes, has given Saia's telephone number to several customers, whose own pro-
duction lines were shut down awaiting the parts that Saia has had trouble delivering. His customers
are now calling him directly to say we're dying out here for need of parts.

Dialogue for Decision Point One

• Construct a dialogue in which Saia responds to the pressure from his supervisor, Karl Reismueller
• Be sure to address the customer complaints

2.5.7.2 Decision Point Two

Decision Point Two

• Frank Saia has discovered that an employee under his supervision, Donald LaRue, has been skipping
tests on the computer chips. Since LaRue began this practice, they have certainly been more on time
in their shipments. Besides, both LaRue and Saia know that many of the hot parts are actually
for systems in the testing phase, rather than for ones that will be put into active use. So testing the
chips for long-term durability that go into these systems seems unnecessary. Still, LaRue was caught
by Quality Control skipping a test, and now Saia needs to make a decision. Upper management has
provided no guidance; they simply told him to handle it and to keep the parts on time.

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• He can't let LaRue continue skipping tests, or at least he shouldn't let this skipping go unsupervised.
LaRue is a good employee, but he doesn't have the science background to know which tests would do
the least damage if they were skipped. He could work with LaRue and help him gure out the best
tests to skip so the least harm is done. But getting directly involved in skipping the tests would mean
violating company policy and federal law.

Dialogue

• Construct a dialogue in which Saia confronts LaRue about skipping the tests
• Address the following issues:
• Should Saia work with LaRue to identify tests that are not necessary and then have LaRue skip these?
• How should Saia and LaRue deal with the concerns that Quality Control has expressed about skipping
the tests? Your rst item here

2.5.7.3 Decision Point Three

Decision Point Three

• Margaret Goodearl works in a supervisory position in the environmental testing group at Hughes
Aircraft. Her supervisor, Donald LaRue, is also the current supervisor for environmental testing.
The group that LaRue and Goodearl together oversee test the chips that Hughes makes in order to
determine that they would survive under the drastic environmental conditions they will likely face.
Rigorous testing of the chips is the ideal, but some chips (the hot chips) get in line ahead of others.
Goodearl has found out that over the last several months, many of these tests are being skipped.
The reason: Hughes has fallen behind in the production schedule and Hughes upper management and
Hughes customers have been applying pressure to get chip production and testing back on schedule.
Moreover, LaRue and others feel that skipping certain tests doesn't matter, since many of these chips
are being used in systems that are in the testing phase, rather than ones that will be put into active
use.

Dialogue

• Construct a dialogue that acts out Goodearl's response to her knowledge that LaRue is regularly
skipping tests
• Address these two issues in your dialogue:
• Should Goodearl rst talk directly to LaRue? What if he responds defensively?
• Should Goodearl go over LaRue's head and discuss his skipping the tests with one of his supervisors?
To whom should she go? How could she prepare for possible retaliation by LaRue? What should she
know before doing this?

2.5.7.4 Decision Point Four

Decision Point Four

• A few months after Margaret Gooderal started her new position, she was presented with a dicult
problem. One of the girls (the women and men in Environmental Testing at Hughes), Lisa Lightner,
came to her desk crying. She was in tears and trembling because Donald LaRue had forcefully insisted
that she pass a chip that she was sure had failed the test she was running. Lightner ran the hermeticity
test on the chips. The chips are enclosed in a metal container, and one of the questions is whether
the seal to that container leaks. From her test, she is sure that the chip is a leakerthe seal is not
airtight so that water and corrosion will seep in over time and damage the chip. She has come to
Gooderal for advice. Should she do what LaRue wants and pass a chip she knows is a leaker?

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78 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

Dialogue

• Construct a dialogue in which Goodearl advises Lightner on what to do

• Consider these issues in constructing your dialogue:
• Should Goodearl and Lightner go over LaRue's head on this issue?
• If not, how should they confront LaRue?

2.5.7.5 Decision Point Five

Decision Point Five

• Ruth Ibarra (from Quality Assurance) has seen Shirley Reddick resealing chips without the autho-
rization stamp. Ibarra has asked Goodearl to nd out what's going on. When Goodearl asks LaRue,
he replies, None of your damn business. Shortly after this, Goodearl receives a phone call from Jim
Temple, one of her superiors, telling her to come to his oce. Temple informs Goodearl in no uncertain
terms that she needs to back down. You are doing it again. You are not part of the team, running to
Quality with every little problem. When Goodearl insisted she did not run to Quality but Quality
came to her, Temple replies, Shape up and be part of the team if you want your job.

Dialogue

• Construct a dialogue in which Gooderal reacts to Temple

• Consider the following issues in constructing your dialogue:
• Is Temple harassing Gooderal? (How do we dene harassing in this context?)
• Should Gooderal prepare for the possibility of being red? How should she do this? What are her
legal options at this point?

2.5.7.6 Decision Point Six

Decision Point Six

• Margaret Goodearl and Ruth Ibarra have made several attempts to get their supervisors to respond to
the problem of skipping the environmental tests. The general response has been to shoot the messenger
rather than respond to the message. Both Goodearl and Ibarra have been branded trouble makers and
told to mind their own business. They have been threatened with dismissal if they persist.
• So they have decided to blow the whistle, having exhausted all the other options. They initiated contact
with ocials in the U.S. government's Oce of the Inspector General. These ocials are interested
but have told Goodearl and Ibarra that they need to document their case.
• One day they nd two hybrids (chips that combine two dierent kinds of semiconductor devices on
a common substrate) on LaRue's desk. These chips which are destined for an air-to-air missile have
failed the leak test. It is obvious that LaRue plans on passing them without further testing during the
evening shift after Goodearl has gone home. Goodearl and Ibarra discuss whether this presents a good
opportunity to document their case for the Oce of the Inspector General.

Dialogue

• Construct an imaginary conversation between Goodearl and Ibarra where they discuss dierent strate-
gies for documenting their concerns to the Oce of the Inspector General?
• Have them consider the following:
• By looking for documented evidence against their employer, have Goodearl and Ibarra violated their
duties of trust and condentiality?
• Some argue that before blowing the whistle, an employee should exhaust internal channels. Have
Goodearl and Ibarra discuss whether they can do anything more inside Hughes before taking evidence
outside

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2.5.7.7 Questions on Dramatic Reections

Directions:
After you have acted out your decision point in the Hughes case, you and your group have two further
activities. First, you will answer the questions below to help you reect generally on the nature of dramatic
rehearsals and specically on recent dramatization. These ve questions (outlined in detail just below) ask
you to discuss your dramatic form, the form of responsible dissent you used, how the action you dramatized
fared with the three ethics tests, the value and interest conicts you dealt with, and the constraints that
bordered your decision point. Second, you will provide a storyboard that summarizes the drama you acted
out before class. This is also detailed just below.
As was said above, John Dewey suggested the idea that underlies these dramatic rehearsals or What-if
dramas. As Dewey puts it "[d]eliberation is actually an imaginative rehearsal of various courses
of conduct. We give way, in our mind, to some impulse; we try, in our mind, some plan.
Following its career through various steps, we nd ourselves in imagination in the presence of
the consequences that would follow: and as we then like and approve, or dislike and disapprove,
these consequences, we nd the original impulse or plan good or bad. Deliberation [becomes]
dramatic and active. . .." (Dewey, 1960, p. 135) Think of your "dramatic rehearsal" as an experiment
carried out in your imagination. The hypothesis is the alternative course of action decided upon by your
group that forms the basis of your "What-if" rehearsal. Imagine that you carry out your alternative in the
real world. What are its consequences? How are these distributed? How would each of the stakeholders in
your case view the action? How does this t in with your conception of a moral or professional career? Your
imagination is the laboratory in which you test the action your group devises as a hypothesis.
This quote will also help you understand the concept of dramatic rehearsal. It comes from John Gardner,
a famous novelist, and Mark Johnson, a theorist in moral imagination. John Gardner has argued that
ction is a laboratory in which we can explore in imagination the probable implications of
people's character and choices. He describes what he calls moral ction as a philosophical
method in which art controls the argument and gives it its rigor, forces the writer to intense
yet dispassionate and unprejudiced watchfulness, drives himin ways abstract logic cannot
matchto unexpected discoveries and, frequently, a change of mind. (Johnson, p. 197;
Gardner, p. 108).
There are dierent versions of what form dramatic form takes. In general there is plot, character, agon
(struggle or confronting obstacles), resolution, and closure. A drama is a narrative, an unfolding of related
events in time. One event arises to give way to another and so forth. Dramas can be driven by the ends of
the characters and the unfolding can be the realization or frustration of these activities. Dramatic rehearsals
take isolated actions and restore them to this context of dramatic form.
1. What is the dramatic form taken on by your enactment?

• Perhaps your drama is a comedy. Many groups have chosen this form but have found it hard to
explain why. How does comedy help your group to get its message across? What is its message?
• Some groups have approached this rehearsal as a tragedy where the good intentions and goals of
those involved all turned out bad. In many ways, this is how the case played out in reality. So, if your
group chose tragedy, then it is important to state why there were no viable alternatives to the choices
actually made by the participants in the Hughes case. What constraints prevented the agents from
achieving their ends? (Look for more than just bad people here.)
• Some groups decided to frame their rehearsal as a documentary Here a narrator describes and frames
the activities carried out by the dierent participants oering commentary and analysis.
• Continuing with the documentary line, some groups have presented their drama as proceedings in a
trial where a judge presides over attorneys presenting the arguments from both sides. This approach
has the advantage of laying out the dierent perspectives but when the judge reaches a decision, it takes
on the risk of oversimplifying the case by making one side completely right and the other completely
wrong. The "winner takes all" interpretation of a court trial (guilty-innocent) often leaves out moral
complexity.

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80 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

• Some groups convert their dramas into Quixotic ventures where they "tilt at windmills." Here
they try to present scenarios where idealistic participants strive to realize their values over dicult,
constraining and harsh realities. The advantage of this approach is that it does not compromise on
values and ideals. The disadvantage is that it may underestimate elements in the real world that
oppose acting on the ideal. Realizing the "intermediate possible" may be the best route here.
• Some groups approach their dramatizations as cautionary tales where they act out the harsh con-
sequences that attend immoral, greedy, selsh, or corruption action. Here the world is constrained by
justice. Those who hubristically try to exceed these constraints are punished for their transgressions.
Cautionary tales are more moralistic than tragedies but, at some point, converge on this other dramatic
form.
• You are, of course, encouraged to go beyond this list by inventing your own dramatic form or combining
those listed above to produce a new, synthetic form. The point here is that dramatic forms both lter
and structure elements of this complicated case. I am asking that you be deliberate and thoughtful
about how you work your way through the Hughes case. What did your dramatic form leave out? How
did it structure the drama dierently than other forms? Why did you choose the form you chose?

2. Your dramatic rehearsal also should test the three forms of responsible dissent we studied
this semester.

• Generic Forms of Dissent. Did your rehearsal test any of the generic forms of dissent such as gather
more information, nolo contendere, oppose diplomatically, oppose confrontationally, distance yourself,
or exit?
• Moral Compromise. Did your rehearsal deploy any of the strategies of moral compromise? For
example, referring to the Ethics of Teamwork, did it deploy bridging, logrolling, expanding the pie, or
non-specic compensation? Were you able to get things moving by negotiating interests rather than
person-based positions? What were the circumstances that elicited compromise? For example, does
the Hughes case display any "moral complexity?"
• Blowing the Whistle. If your drama followed the case and advocated blowing the whistle, provide a
justication using the class framework. For example, argue that whistleblowing was permissible or that
it was obligatory. To whom do your recommend blowing the whistle given the problems Ibarra and
Goodearl had with the Inspector General's oce? How would you recommend they go about gathering
documented evidence? What should they do before blowing the whistle? In short, do more, both in
your drama and in this reection, than just advocate the action. Describes the means, complexities,
and circumstances surrounding blowing the whistle on Hughes.

3. Outline your ethics experiment by examining the action you advocate using the three ethics
tests.

• Reversibility. How does your action look when you reverse with the key stakeholders? Project into
their shoes avoiding the extremes of too much identication and too little identication.
• Harm. What harms have you envisioned through your dramatic rehearsal? Are these harms less
quantitatively and qualitatively than the action actually taken in the case?
• Publicity. Finally, project the action taken in your rehearsal into the career of a moral professional.
Is it consistent with this career or does it embrace (or neglect) values out of place in such a career. In
other words, carry out the publicity test by associating the values embedded in the action you portray
with the character of a good or moral agent carrying out a moral, professional career.

4. Value and interest conicts in your drama.

• All these decision points involve some kind of conict. How did you characterize this conict in your
dramatization? Pose your conict in terms of values. How did your drama "resolve" this value conict?

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 81

5. Recognizing and dealing with the constraints you found in your decision point.
These drama/decision points had dierent kinds and degrees of constraints. Early decision points have fewer
constraints than later because the earlier decisions both condition and constrain those that follow. Here is
another issue you may need to address. Your feasibility test from the "Three Frameworks" module outlines
three kinds of constraints: resource, interest (social or personality), and technical. Did any of these apply?
Outline these and other constraints and describe how they were dealt with in your drama.

2.5.7.7.1 Story Boards

Suggestions for Story Boards

• Divide your dramatization into four to six frmaes. Now draw a picture in each frame, one that captures
a key moment of your dramatization.
• Check for continuity. Each frame should present elements that show how it emerges from the previous
frame and how it transitions into the subsequent frame. The rst frame should help the reader nd
the context in which your drama takes place. The last frame should provide as much closure as your
drama permits.
• In general, your storyboard should summarize the dramatization you acted out in front of the rest of the
class. But while acting through your drama, you received feedback from the class and, perhaps, began
to rethink things. So feel free to make changes in your storyboard to reect your deeper understanding
of your decision point. If you make changes in your storyboard, discuss this in your dramatic reections.
Explain why you decided to change things.

2.5.7.8 Hughes Case Media Files

Hughes Case and Dialogue Points

[Media Object]
11 .
[Media Object] 12
What If Dramatic Rehearsals
[Media Object]13
Debating Topics for ADMI 4016, Spring 2011
[Media Object]14
Jeopardy: Responsible Dissent
[Media Object]15
Jeopardy for codes of ethics
[Media Object]16
2.5.8 Bibliography
• Martin Benjamin. (1990). Splitting the Dierence: Compromise and Integrity in Ethics and
Politics. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.
11 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<Hughes_V3a.pptx>
12 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<Responsible Dissent.pptx>
13 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<Hughes_Drama_V2.pptx>
14 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<Reections on debate.pptx>
15 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<Jeopardy6.pptx>
16 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<Jeo_Codes.pptx>

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82 CHAPTER 2. DECISION MAKING IN THE PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

• Chuck Hu and William Frey. "The Hughes Whistleblowing Case." In Reena Raj (Ed.) Whistle-
blowing: Perspectives and Experiences, 75-80. 2008, Hyderabad India: Icfai University Press.
• Charles Harris, Michael Pritchard, Michael Rabins. "Engineers as Employees," in Engineering
Ethics: Concepts and Cases, 2nd Edition. Wadsworth Thompson Learning, 2000. Section
8.8 of Chapter 8 discusses DeGeorge's criteria for whistle-blowing.
• Richard T. DeGeorge. "Ethical Responsibilities of Engineers in Large Organizations," in Business
and Professional Ethics Journal, Vol 1, no. 1: 1-14.
• Stephen H., Unger, Controlling Technology: Ethics and the Responsible Engineer: 2nd
Edition, New York: John Wiley and Sons, INC, 1994.
• Richard T. De George, "Ethical Responsibilities of Engineers in Large Organizations: The Pinto Case,"
in Ethical Issues in Engineering, ed. Deborah G. Johnson (1991) New Jersey: Prentice-Hall: 175-
186.
• Carolyn Whitbeck (1998) Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research. U.K. Cambridge Uni-
versity Press: 55-72 and 176-181. See also 2nd edition (2011) Chapter 7.
• Charles Harris, Michael Pritchard and Michael Rabins (2005) Engineering Ethics: Concepts and
Cases, 3rd Ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth: 203-206.
• Gardner, J. (1978). On Moral Fiction. New York: Basic Books.
• Johnson, M. (1994). Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Chapter 3

Professional Codes of Ethics

1
3.1 Pirate Code for Engineering Ethics

3.1.1 Statements of Value/Codes of Ethics

• William J. Frey
• Center for Ethics in the Professions
• University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez

3.1.2 Module Introduction

In this module, you will learn about professional and occupational codes of ethics by looking at a bad code,
writing your own code, and then critically examine a professional code of ethics, the engineering code for
the Colegio de Ingenieros y Agrimensores de Puerto Rico. Three exercises will take you through the process
of examining the Pirate Creed, writing your own code, and examining the Colegio's code. Text boxes will
provide helpful background information on purposes served by professional codes, philosophical objections,
and a framework for working your way through a stakeholder-based code like that of the CIAPR or the
National Society of Professional Engineers. This module provides a Spanish translation of the Pirate Creed
prepared by Dr. Dana Livingston Collins of the Department of Humanities in the University of Puerto Rico
at Mayagüez.
Concluding this module are two word documents uploaded as media les. One provides the exercises
that are presented in this module in XML format. The other provides the background information that has
been presented in this module as Textboxes.

3.1.3 Module Activities

1. You will analyze the Pirate Creed in terms of (a) its dierent functions, (b) the community values it
embodies, and (c) how it stands toward nonmembers of the pirate community as well as members.
2. You will write a code of ethics for an occupational or professional area such as business or engineering.
3. You will debrief the rest of the class on your group's code, clarify its functions and values, and defend
it if necessary.
4. This module will conclude with a look at the code of ethics of the Puerto Rico State Society of
Professional Engineers and Land surveyors or Colegio de Ingenieros y Agrimensores de Puerto
Rico.

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84 CHAPTER 3. PROFESSIONAL CODES OF ETHICS

3.1.4 Pirates Creed of Ethics (translated into Spanish by Dana Collins)

1. El capitán tendrá comando total durante una batalla y tendrá la autoridad para dirigir el barco. El
que no sigua al capitán podrá ser castigado se la tripulación no vota en contra del castigo.
2. Si el barco naufraga, la tripulación permanecerá unidos hasta el capitán consigue otra nave. Si la nave
es propiedad común de la tripulación, la primera nave capturada pertenecerá al capitán con una (1)
parte de botín.
3. El cirujano del barco recibirá doscientas (200) coronas para el mantenimiento de su equipo médico y
recibirá una (1) parte del botín.
4. Los otros ociales recibirán una (1) parte cada uno, y si se distinguen, la tripulación determinará
cuanto recibirán como recompensa.
5. El botín de una nave capturada será distribuido en partes iguales.
6. El primero que señale la aparición de un barco que sea capturado recibirá cien (100) coronas.
7. El que pierda un ojo, una mano, o una pierna mientras está en servicio, recibirá hasta seis esclavos o
seiscientas (600) coronas.
8. Los suministros y raciones serán compartidos por igual.
9. La penalidad por traer una mujer disfrazada a bordo es la muerte.
10. Si un hermano roba de otro, perderá su nariz u orejas. Se peca de nuevo, se le darán un mosquete,
municiones, plomo y una botella de agua y será abandonado en una isla.
11. Si hay duda en una disputa entre hermanos, una corte de honor determinará el veredicto. Si un
hermano es encontrado culpable, la primera vez será perdonado, pero al ofender de nuevo, será atado
a un cañón y recibirá un latigazo de cada miembro de la tripulación. El mismo castigo será dado a
todos, incluyendo ociales, quienes se emborrachen al punto de perder sus sentidos mientras estén en
el barco.
12. El que se duerma mientras está trabajando como centinela, recibirán latigazos por todos los miembros
de la tripulación. Se repite el crimen, su cabeza será rajada.
13. A todos quienes conspiren para desertar, o lo que hayan desertado y sean capturados, sus cabezas serán
rajadas.
14. Pelas entre varios hermanos mientras estén a bordo será resueltos en tierra con pistolas y espadas. El
que saque primera sangre será el vencedor. No pueden golpear a otro mientras estén a bordo de la
nave.

3.1.5 Exercise 1: Pirate Creed

• What is good about the Pirate Creed of Ethics?
• what is bad about the Pirate Creed of Ethics?
• What is the purpose of the Creed for the Pirate Community?
• What values are embedded in the Pirate Creed
• How does the Pirate Creed deal with nonmembers?

3.1.6 Exercise 2: Writing a Code of Ethics for Engineers

• Step One: Identify the purpose behind your engineering code of ethics. For example, is it to punish
wrongful behavior, provide a set of guidelines, educate the community, support ethical behavior, or
create an ethics dialogue?
• Step Two: Identify the contributions that engineering makes to society.
• Step Three: Identify the stakeholders of the engineering profession. A stakeholder is any group or
individual with a vital or essential interest tied to what engineers do. along with these stakeholders,
identify their stakes, that is, the goods, rights, interests or values that are maintained, promoted, or
diminished by what engineers do?

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• Step Four: Enumerate the obligations or duties that engineers have toward each of these stakeholders.
In other words, what can engineers do to maintain, promote, or diminish the stakes of each stakeholder?
• Step Five: Identify the conicting obligations that arise from the fact that engineers have dierent
stakeholders who hold conicting stakes? Do any of these stakeholders or stakes have obvious priority
over the others?
• Step Six: Step back and reect on what you have written. For example, look for dierent kinds of
provisions. Does your code use ideals of the profession which set forth the profession's central or
cardinal objectives? Does your code contain principles of professional conduct which set forth
minimal levels of behavior and prerscribe sanctions and punishments for compliance failures? In the
CIAPR (Colegio de Ingenieros y Agrimensores de Puerto Rico) code of ethics, the fundamental
principles and basic canons set forth the ideals of the profession. The principles of professional conduct
fall in the section on practical norms.
• Step Seven: The Final Audit. Submit your code to an overall audit to see if anything has been
left out. Have you included all the stakeholders and their stakes? Have you left out any ethical
considerations such as rights and duties? Compare your code to the law. Are your code's provisions
legal? Do they overlap with existing law? Do they imply criticisms of existing laws? If they imply
punishments or sanctions, what measures does your code prescribe to administer justly and properly
these sanctions? Finally, be sure to guard against the equal but opposite sins of over-specicity and
too much generality. Overly specic codes try to provide a rule for every possible situation. Because
this is impossible, these codes tend toward rigidity, inexibility, and irrelevance. Codes that are too
general fail because they can be interpreted to rationalize any kind of claim and, thus, mask immoral
actions and intentions.

3.1.7 Exercise 3: Studying the code of Ethics of the Colegio de Ingenieros y

Agrimensores de Puerto Rico
• Identify the provisions that touch upon the relation of the engineer to the public. What goods are at
stake in this relation? What can engineers do to preserve or promote these goods?
• Identify provisions that touch upon the relation of the engineer to the client. What goods are at stake
in this relation? What can engineers do to preserve or promote these goods?
• Identify provisions that touch upon the relation of the engineer to the CIAPR (professional engineering
society) What goods are at stake in this relation? what can engineers do to preserve or promote these
goods?.
• Finally, identify provisions that touch upon the relation of the engineer to other engineers (peer rela-
tions). What goods are at stake in this relation? What can engineers do to preserve or promote these
goods?

3.1.8 Textbox 1: Code of Ethics of Colegio de Ingenieros y Agrimensores de

Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico State society of Professional Eng
• The CIAPR code of ethics has three parts:
• Part One: Three Fundamental Principles which express cardinal objectives for engineering practice in
Puerto Rico
• Part Two: Ten Canons which set forth general rules for ethical engineering practice
• Part Three: Each canon is repeated followed by several practical norms. by setting forth detailed rules,
practical norms specify and interpret the basic canons. They also set forth specic and concrete rules
for professional and ethical conduct
• The CIAPR code of ethics is a stakeholder code. This means it identies engineering stakeholders, the
goods they depend upon, and the duties engineers have in protecting or promoting these goods.

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86 CHAPTER 3. PROFESSIONAL CODES OF ETHICS

Key Engineer Relations

• The relation between engineer and public is founded on the goods of health, safety and welfare.
• The relation between engineer and client is founded on the good of faithful agency (trust).
• The relation between the individual engineer and the profession is founded on the engineer working
to maintain the good reputation and integrity of the profession.
• The peer relation between practicing engineers is founded on the good of collegiality.

Engineer and Public

• Duties arising in this relation are tied to maintaining or promoting the goods of health, safety, and
welfare. They include minimizing harm, avoiding paternalism (making decisions for others who have
the right and ability to make these for themselves), free and informed consent (the right of those taking
a risk to consent to that risk).
• FP1: Deberán considerar su principal función como profesionales la de servir a la humanidad. Su
relación como professional y cliente, y como professional y patrono, deberá estar sujeta a su función
fundamental de promover el bienestar de la humanidad y la de proteger el interés público.
• Canon 1: Velar por sobre toda otra consideración por la seguridad, el ambiente, la salud y el bienestar
de la comunidad en la ejecución de sus responsabilidades profesionales.
• Practical Norm 1d: Cuando tengan conocimiento o suciente razón para creer que otro ingeniero
o agrimensor viola las disposiciones de este Código, o que una persona o rma pone en peligro la
seguridad, el ambiente, la salud o el bienestar de la comunidad, presentarán tal información por escrito
a las autoridades concernidas y cooperarán con dichas autoridades proveyendo aquella información o
asistencia que les sea requerida.

Engineer to Client

• Duties stemming from this relation arise out of faithful agency, that is, the responsibility of an engineer
to remain true to the client's interests. Positively this includes exercising due care for the client by
carrying out the client's interests through the exercise of sound, competent engineering professional
judgment. Negatively this entails avoiding conicts of interest and revealing the client's condential
information.
• Faithful Agency: Canon 4Actuar en asuntos profesionales para cada patrono o cliente como agentes
eles o duciarios, y evitar conictos de intereses o la mera apariencia de éstos, manteniendo siempre
la independencia de criterio como base del profesionalismo.
• Conict of Interest: 4aEvitarán todo conicto de intereses conocido o potencial con sus patronos
o clientes e informarán con prontitud a sus patronos o clientes sobre cualquier relación de negocios,
intereses o circunstancias que pudieran inuenciar su juicio o la calidad de sus servicios.
• Condentiality: 4iTratarán toda información, que les llegue en el curso de sus encomiendas pro-
fesionales, como condencial y no usarán tal información como medio para lograr benecio personal si
tal acción es adversa a los intereses de sus clientes, de sus patronos, de las comisiones o juntas a las
que pudiera pertenecer o del público.

Engineer to Profession

• This includes working to promote the profession's autonomy and independence as well as main-
taining its good reputation. Moreover it requires that engineers participate in their professional
society, work to advance engineering, be objective and impartial in their work, and associate only with
persons of good reputation.
• Canon 3: Emitir declaraciones públicas únicamente en una forma veraz y objetiva.
• Practical Norm 3a: Serán objetivos y veraces en informes profesionales, declaraciones o testimonios.
Incluirán toda la información relevante y pertinente en tales informes, declaraciones o testimonios.

Engineer to Engineer

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• This relation is based on the good of Collegiality. It requires that engineers work to maintain friendly
and collaborative relations with other engineers by avoiding disloyal competition and comparative
advertising and by always giving peers due credit for their contributions to engineering projects and
designs.
• Practical Norm 4l: Antes de realizar trabajos para otros, en los cuales puedan hacer mejoras, planos,
diseños, inventos, u otros registros, que puedan justicar la obtención de derechos de autor o patentes,
llegarán a un acuerdo en relación con los derechos de las respectivas partes. (Give due credit to
colleagues for their work).
• Canon 5: Edicar su reputación profesional en el mérito de sus servicios y no competir deslealmente
con otros. (Avoid disloyal competition)
• Practical Norm 6b: Anunciarán sus servicios profesionales sin auto-alabanza y sin lenguaje en-
gañoso y de una manera en que no se menoscabe la dignidad de sus profesiones. (Non-comparative
advertising)
• Practical Norm 5h: No tratarán de suplantar, ni suplantarán otro ingeniero o agrimensor, después de
que una gestión profesional le haya sido ofrecida o conada a éste, ni tampoco competirá injustamente
con él. (Avoid disloyal competition)

3.1.9 Professional Codes as Social Contracts

• What some have said about dening ethics could also be applied to dening a profession: it's a bit
like "nailing jello to a tree." Nevertheless, we can make to reasonable claims about professions: tye
can be treated as social contracts, and they have someting to do with specialized knowledge. If these
two claims hold, then a third claim can be made, namely, that professions have an ineliminable ethical
dimension.
• A legitimate contract between two parties requires a quid pro quo (a mutually benecial exchange)
and free consent (consent that includes full information and excludes force or deception). The social
contract between engineering and society can be pictured int he following way:

Profession as Social Contract

Society grants to Profession Profession grants to Society

Autonomy Self-Regulation
Prestige Primacy of public health, safety, and welfare
Monopoly Developing and enforcing ethical and professional standards

Table 3.1

Society grants autonomy, prestige, and monopoly control to the profession of engineering.

1. Autonomy includes freedom from regulation and control from the outside through cumbersome laws,
regulations, and statutes.
2. Prestige includes high social status and generous pay.
3. Monopoly status implies that the profession of engineering itself determines who can practice engineer-
ing and how it should be practiced.
4. The profession promises to use its autonomy responsibly by regulating itself. it does this by developing
and enforcing professional and ethical standards. By granting prestige to the profession, society has
removed the need for the profession to collectively bargain for its self-interest.
5. Not having to worry about its collective self-interest, the profession is now free to hold paramount the
health, safety, and welfare of the public.

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88 CHAPTER 3. PROFESSIONAL CODES OF ETHICS

6. This contract explains why professions develop codes of ethics. Codes document to the public the
profession's commitment to carry out its side of the social contract, namely, to hold paramount public
welfare. They can do this because society will honor its side of the contract, namely, to remove from
the profession the need to ght for its self-interest

This social contract is more symbolic and explanatory than real.

• Codes allow the profession to document to society that it has developed proper standards and intends
to enforce them. They express the profession's trust in society to keep its side of the bargain by
granting autonomy, prestige, and monopoly. Of course this contract has never been explicitly enacted
at a point in historical time. But the notion of a social contract with a mutually benecial exchange
(a quid pro quo) provides a useful device for modeling the relation that has actually evolved between
society and its professions.

Professions and Responsibility

• Professions have been created to exercise stewardship over knowledge and skill domains.
• Exercising stewardship over X generally means watching over, preserving, protecting, and even im-
proving X. Stewardship is a forward-looking kind of responsibility similar to the responsibility that a
parent exercises toward his or her children. The steward is a trusted servant or agent of the landowner
who acts in the owner's place while the later is absent or incapacitated.
• "Stewardship," thus, refers to the profession's responsibility to safeguard its specic domain of knowl-
edge and skill. This domain is essential to society in some way (it provides society with a basic, common
good) and society delegates responsibility for this domain to its members who are specially suited to
exercise it.
• So, generally speaking, professions can be characterized in terms of epistemological and ethical respon-
sibilities.
• The epistemological responsibility refers to stewardship over the knowledge and skills that characterizes
the profession. The profession preserves, transmit, and advances this domain of knowledge and skill.
(Epistemology = study of knowledge.)
• The ethical dimension refers to the responsibility of the profession to safeguard knowledge and skill
for the good of society. Society trusts the profession to do this for the sake of the comnmon good.
Society also trusts the profession to regulate its own activities by developing and enforcing ethical and
professional standards.

3.1.10 Objections to and Mischievous Side Eects of Codes of Ethics

These objections are taken from John Ladd, "The Quest for a Code of Professional Ethics: An
Intellectual and Moral Confusion." This article can be found in Deborah G. Johnson, editor,
(1991) Ethical Issues in Engineering, New Jersey: Prentice Hall: 130-136. The author of this
module has taken some liberties in this presentation.

• Codes "confuse ethics with law-making" (Ladd, 130). Ethics is deliberative and argumentative
while law-making focuses on activities such as making and enforcing rules and policies.
• A code of ethics is an oxymoron. Ethics requires autonomy of the individual while a code assumes
the legitimacy of an external authority imposing rule and order on that individual.
• Obedience to moral law for autonomous individuals is motivated by respect for the moral
law. On the other hand, obedience to civil law is motivated by fear of punishment.
Thus, Ladd informs us that when one attaches "discipinary procedures, methods of adjudication and
sanctions, formal and informal, to the principles that one calls 'ethical' one automatically converts them
into legal rules or some other kind of authoritative rules of conduct...."(Ladd 131) Accompanying code
provisions with punishments replaces obedience based on respect for the (moral) law with conformity
based on fear of punishment.

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• Codes lead to the dangerous tendency to reduce the ethical to the legal. Ethical principles
can be used to judge or evaluate a disciplinary or legal code. But the reverse is not true; existing laws
cannot trump ethical principles in debates over ethical issues and ethical decisions. As Ladd puts it,
"That is not to say that ethics has no relevance for projects involving the creation, certication and
enforcement of rules of conduct for members of certain groups....[I]ts [ethics's] role in connection with
these projects is to appraise, criticize and perhaps even defend (or condemn) the projects themselves,
the rules, regulations and procedures they prescribe, and the social and political goals and institutions
they represent." (Ladd 130)
• Codes have been used to justify immoral actions. Professional codes have been misued by
individuals to justify actions that go against common morality. For example, lawyers may use the fact
that the law is an adversarial system to justify lying. Ladd responds in the following way to this dodge:
"{T}here is no special ethics belonging to professionals. Professionals are not, simply because they
are professionals, exempt from the common obligations, duties and responsibilities that are binding on
ordinary people. They do not have a special moral status that allows them to do things that no one
else can." (Ladd 131)

Mischievous Side-Eects of Codes (from John Ladd)

• Codes make professionals complacent. (Ladd 135) First, they reduce the ethical to the minimally
acceptable. Second, they cover up wrongful actions or policies by calling themwithin the context
of the code"ethical". For example, the NSPE code of ethics used to prohibit competitive bidding.
Enshrining it in their code of ethics gave it the appearance of being ethical when in fact it was motivated
primarily by self interest. This provision was removed when it was declared unconstitutional by the
U.S. Supreme Court for violating the Anti-Trust law.
• Because codes focus on micro-ethical problems, "they tend to divert attention from macro-
ethical problems of a profession." (Ladd 135) For example, in Puerto Rico, the actions of the
Disciplinary Tribunal of the Colegio de Ingenieros y Agrimensores de Puerto Rico tend to focus on
individual engineers who violate code provisions concerned with individual acts of corruption; these
include conicts of interest, failing to serve as faithful agents or trustees, and participating in corrupt
actions such as taking or giving bribes. On the other hand, the CIAPR does not place equal attention
on macro-ethical problems such as "the social responsibilities of professionals as a group" (Ladd 132),
the role of the profession and its members in society (Ladd 135), and the "role professions play in
determining the use of technology, its development and expansion, and the distribution of the costs."
(Ladd 135)

3.1.11 Exercise: Questions for Reection

1. Which of Ladd's criticisms apply to the Pirate Creed?
2. How does your group's code of ethics stand in relation to Ladd's criticisms?
3. Do Ladd's objections apply t the ABET, NSPE, or CIAPR codes?

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90 CHAPTER 3. PROFESSIONAL CODES OF ETHICS

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Figure 3.1: Module Exercises.

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Chapter 4

Engineering Ethics Bowl

1
4.1 Ethics Bowl Rules and Procedures

This media le describes the rules and procedures for the UPRM version of the ethics bowl competition.
Included is a timeline for the competition and a rubric that identies the four scoring categories. Both have
been adopted from the national ethics bowl competition developed by Robert Ladenson and held yearly at
the meetings of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics.

Downloadable MS Word File

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Figure 4.1: Ethics Bowl Rules and Procedures.

This media le has a powerpoint presentation delivered by Jose Cruz, Halley Sanchez, and William Frey
at the 2004 meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. The presentation describes
activities that help prepare students for the competition, shows how the cases used in the competition are se-
lected, breaks down the competition into its constituent parts, and describes how students are debriefed after
the competition. The activities used to prepare students for the competition are crucial; they provide op-
portunities to practice skills in moral imagination. Debrieng activities are equally important since students
frequently fail to see how they have developed skills in preparing for and participating in the competition.
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91
92 CHAPTER 4. ENGINEERING ETHICS BOWL

Ethics Bowl at UPRM

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Figure 4.2: This gure describes preparatory activities, debate structure, and debrieng exercises for
an adaption of the Ethics Bowl held in Engineering Ethics classes at the University of Puerto Rico at
Mayaguez. It was presented at APPE in 2004.

2
4.2 Ethics Bowl: Cases and Score Sheets

4.2.1 Module Introduction

This module is designed to give you a brief orientation in the Ethics Bowl competition. It is designed to
compliment and complete other modules concerning the ethics bowl that you will nd in the Corporate
Governance course.

4.2.2 Ethics Bowl Rules (briey)

• The moderator will begin the competition by ipping a coin to determine which team will present rst.
If the team that calls wins the toss, they choose whether they or the other team go rst.
• Monday: (1) Team 1 will have one minute to consult and seven minutes to give its initial presentation.
The presentation must be tied to the question/task given to it by the moderator. (2) Team 2 has a
minute to consult and seven minutes to make its Commentary on Team 1's presentation. Team 2 can
close its commentary by posing a question to Team 1. (3) Team 1 then has a minute to consult and
veminutes to respond to Team 2's Commentary. (4) Team 1 will then answer questions posed by the
two peer review teams. Each peer review team will ask a question. A quick follow-up is allowed. The
peer review question and answer session will go for 15 minutes. (5) The peer review teams will score
the rst half of the competition but not announce the results.
• Wednesday: The same procedure will occur while reversing the roles between Teams 1 and 2. Thus,
team 2 will present, team 1 comment, team 2 respond, and then team 2 will answer questions from the
peer review panels. The peer review panels will add the scores for the second part of the competition
but will hold o on announcing the results until Friday's class.
• Friday: The two peer review teams will present and explain their scores. Peer Review teams will take
note: you're objective is not to criticize or evaluate the debating teams but to provide them feedback
in terms of the four categories.
• Debating teams may trade minutes from consulting to presenting. For example, Team 1 may decide to
take two minutes to consult when given their case and task. This means that they will have 6 minutes,
instead of 7, to present.
• Nota Bene: Debating teams and Peer Review teams are not allowed to bring notes into the competition.
You will be provided with paper to take notes once the competition starts.
• Even though the national Ethics Bowl competition allows only one presenter, debating teams will be
allowed to "pass the baton." When one person nishes speaking, another can step in his or her place.
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 93

It is absolutely forbidden that more than one person speak at a time. Also, the competing team's
speaking time is limited to its commentary. Once that is over, they are instructed to quitely listen.
Infractions will be followed rst by a warning. Second infractions will result in points being taken
away.

4.2.3 Competition Time Line

1. Team 1 Presentation: One minute to consult, seven minutes to present.
2. Team 2 Commentary: One minute to consult, seven minutes to present.
3. Team 1 Response to Commentary: One minute to consult, ve minutes to respond.
4. The question and answer session between Team 1 and the Peer Review teams will last 15 minutes
(running clock). The rst peer review team will have 7 minutes 30 seconds for its questions and the
second will have roughly the same time.
5. In the second round, the time line is the same while the debating teams change roles.

4.2.4 Advice to Debating Teams

• Tell us what you are going to do, do it, and then tell us what you have done. In other words, start your
presentation with a summary, then launch into the main body of your presentation, and then conclude
with another summary. This will help the listening audience understand what you are trying to do.
• Be professional, formal, and courteous. Address yourself to the other team and the peer review team.
It is a good idea to stand when you are giving your initial presentation.
• Be sure to communicate your understanding of the scoring criteria. What do you and your team
understand by intelligibility, ethical integration, feasibility, and moral imagination/creativity? Take
time to listen to the other team and the peer review teams to gain insights into their understanding.
During the commentary and the question and answer session you will get crucial clues into what others
think you have achieved and where you need further work. Use this feedback.
• Be sure to thank the peer review teams, moderators, and your opponents during and after the compe-
tition. Such formalities make it possible to penetrate to the deeper practices that underlie the virtue
of reasonableness.
• Relax and have fun! You may not have the opportunity to say everything you want to say. One of the
purposes behind this competition is to help you see just how hard it is to advocate for ethical positions.
We almost always have to do so under serious constraints such as time limits. Also, remember that
you have other forums for "getting it said," namely, your group self evaluation and your in-depth
case analysis. In these places you will be able to discuss these issues in the kind of depth you think
necessary.

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94 CHAPTER 4. ENGINEERING ETHICS BOWL

4.2.5 Advice to the Peer Review Teams on Scoring

• Remember that all three scoring events of the competition are worth 20 points. The initial presentation,
the response to the commentary and questions, and the commentary on the other team's presentation
all count for the same 20 points.
• Although you have the complete rubric only for the initial presentation, you will score the other parts
of the presentation based on the four criteria: intelligibility, ethical integration, feasibility and moral
imagination/creativity. You will score 1 to 5 on each criteria for a total of 20.
• Three is the middle of the road score. In other words, three is a good, average score. It is not a Cdon't
think of scoring as grading. Start each team o from a default of three. Then move o that default
only when something exceptionally good or not so good happens. If your scores deviate much from
straight twelves (36), then you are scoring too high or too low.

4.2.6 Ethics Bowl Scoring Criteria

1. Intelligibility includes three skills or abilities: (1) the ability to construct and compare multiple
arguments representing multiple viewpoints; (2) the ability to construct arguments and provide reasons
that are clear, coherent, and factually correct; (3) evidence of realizing the virtue of reasonableness by
formulating and presenting value integrative solutions?
2. Integrating Ethical Concerns includes three skills: (1) presenting positions that are clearly re-
versible between stakeholders; (2) identifying and weighing key consequences of positions considered;
(3) developing positions that integrate values like integrity, responsibility, reasonableness, honesty,
humility, and justice.
3. Feasibility implies that the positions taken and the arguments formulated demonstrate full recognition
and integration of interest, resource, and technical constraints. While solutions are designed with
constraints in mind, these do not serve to trump ethical considerations.
4. Moral Imagination and Creativity demonstrate four skill sets: (1) ability to clearly formulate and
frame ethical issues and problems; (2) ability to provide multiple framings of a given situation; (3)
ability to identify and integrate conicting stakeholders and stakes; (4) ability to generate solutions
and positions that are non-obvious, i.e., go beyond what is given in the situation.

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 95

4.2.7 Peer Review Team Responsibilities

• Attend the debate sessions and the feedback session on Friday after the competition. Remember this
is the capstone event of the course. It looks bad if you do not bother to attend.
• You team will ask questions during the debate. This will constitute, at a minimum, one question and a
quick follow up if necessary. You are not to debate with the presenting team. So your questions should
not be designed to trap them. Rather, seek through your questions to explore seeming weak points,
unclear statements, and incomplete thoughts. Use your questions to help you line up the debating
team against the four criteria.
• Fill out the score sheet and assess the debating teams in terms of intelligibility, integrating ethics,
feasibility and moral imagination/creativity.
• Lead, with the other Peer Review team, the feedback sessions. This requires that you prepare a short,
informal presentation that shows your scoring and then explains it.
• Always, always, always be courteous in your feedback comments. Try to present things positively and
proactively. This is dicult but practice now will serve you well later when you are trying to explaibn
to a supervisor how he or she has made a mistake.

4.2.8 Media Files with Cases and Score Sheets

Engineering Ethics Bowl

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Figure 4.3: Score Sheet Team One.

Engineering Ethics Bowl

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Figure 4.4: Score Sheet Team Two.

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96 CHAPTER 4. ENGINEERING ETHICS BOWL

Ethics Bowl Cases

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Bowl Cases for Spring 2007.doc

Figure 4.5: Click here to open the word le containing the 12 Ethics Bowl classes for Business Ethics
Apring 2007.

Ethics Bowl Cases for Fall 2007

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Fall07_W97.doc

Figure 4.6: These are the cases for the Ethics Bowl Competition for the Fall Semester in the year 2007.
These scenarios or decision points are taken from Incident at Morales, Hughes Aircraft Case, Biomatrix
Case, and Toysmart Case.

Debrieng for Ethics Bowl, Round Two

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Figure 4.7: This presentation was given Friday, April 27 to the Ethics Bowl teams that debated on the
Therac-25 case and the Inkjet case.

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 97

4.3 Practical and Professional Ethics Bowl Activity: Follow-Up In-

3
Depth Case Analysis

4.3.1 Module Introduction

This module provides students with a structure for preparing an in-depth case study analysis based on
feedback they have received through their participation in an Ethics Bowl competition as part of the
requirements for courses in Practical and Professional Ethics taught at the University of Puerto Rico at
Mayaguez. Students viewing this module will nd formats for analyzing decision making cases and position
cases such as the decisions published by the National Society of Professional Engineers Board of Ethical
Review. They will receive information pertinent to preparing in-depth case analyses, short summaries
of the case pool for the Ethics Bowl competition, and a summary of procedures for carrying out a group
self-evaluation. More information on the Engineering Ethics Bowl carried out at UPRM can be found in
Jose A Cruz-Cruz, William J. Frey, and Halley D. Sanchez, "The Ethics Bowl in Engineering Ethics at the
University of Puerto Rico - Mayaguez" in Teaching Ethics 4(3): 15-32.

4.3.2 Choosing Your Case

1. You must choose one of the two cases you presented on in the Ethics Bowl. (This means the case on
which you gave your initial presentation.
2. You may choose either the rst round decision-making case or the NSPE Board of Ethical Review Case

How should you choose your case?

1. Which case did you nd the most interesting, challenging, or fruitful?
2. On which case did you receive the most interesting feedback from the other team and the judges?
3. Do you want to make, defend, and implement a decision or analyze a BER decision?

Once you choose your case, you need to analyze it according to the following steps:
Decision-Making Cases

Worksheets Decision-Making Case

Identify and state the (ethically) relevant facts

STS Table (Table + Verbal Explanation) Prepare a Socio-Technical Analysis. Fill in the STS
table (see below) and then verbally describe each
component.
Value Table (Table + Written Problem Statement) Fill out a Value Table (see below) Use it to identify
the ethical problem or problems. Summarize this
by providing a concise problem statement that is
explicitly tied to the Value Table.
continued on next page

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98 CHAPTER 4. ENGINEERING ETHICS BOWL

Brainstorm Lists (initial and rened lists) 4. Brainstorm solution to the problem or problems.
Be sure to discuss how list was generated and how it
was rened. Describe value integration and interest
negotiating strategies used.
Solution Evaluation Matrix (Matrix + Verbal Ex- 5. Compare, evaluate, and rank the solutions
planation and Justication)
6. Choose the best available solution. Provide a jus-
tication summarizing ethical and feasibility con-
siderations highlighted in Solution Evaluation Ma-
trix.
Feasibility Matrix (Matrix + Verbal Explanation) 7. Develop a plan for implementing your solution.
Discuss and justify this plan explicitly in terms of
the specic feasibility considerations in the Feasi-
bility Matrix.
Develop and discuss preventive measures (if appli-
cable)

Table 4.1

NSPE-BER Case

Worksheets
1. Identify and state the (ethically) relevant facts
Stakeholders (Matrix + Verbal Explanation) 2. Identify the stakeholders and their stakes.
Problem Classication (Matrix + Concise Verbal 3. Identify the ethical problem or problems
Problem Statement)
4. State the BER decision and summarize their
code-based justication (cite code provisions, sum-
marize principles, and list relevant precedents)
Solution Evaluation (Matrix + detailed verbal ex- 5. Evaluate the BER decision using the three ethics
planation and justication) tests, code test, and global feasibility test.
6. Construct a strong counter-position and counter-
argument to the BER decision
Solution Evaluation (Matrix + detailed verbal ex- 7. Evaluate counter-position and counter-argument
planation and justication) using the 3 ethics tests, feasibility test, and code
test
continued on next page

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 99

Solution Implementation (Feasibility Matrix + Ver- 8. Evaluate counter-position and counter-argument

bal Explanation) in terms of relevant feasibility considerations. Pro-
vide a matrix/table + verbal explanation.

Table 4.2

4.3.3 In-Depth Analysis: Step by Step

Description of In-Depth Case Analysis
Title of Assignment: "In-Depth Case Analysis
Due Date for Written Projects:One week after the last class of the semester.
What is required?
1. Participation in at two ethics bowl competitions.
2. Each group will choose from the two cases it debated in the Ethics Bowl a case for a more extended
analysis carrying out the seven-step decision making framework. They will prepare an extended analysis of
this case (10 to 20 pages).
3. Each group will prepare summaries of the 15 cases assigned for the ethics bowl. These summaries
(a minimum of one page for each case) will be handed in with the extended case study analysis. These
summaries should include a problem statement, a solution evaluation matrix, and a feasibility matrix.
4. Each nal submission will also include a group self-evaluation. This evaluation will include:

• _____a list of the goals each group set for itself

• _____a careful, justied and documented assessment of your success in reaching these goals
• _____a careful assessment of what you did and did not learn in this activity
• _____a discussion of obstacles you encountered and measures your group took to overcome these.
• _____a discussion of member participation and contribution including the member contribution
forms
• _____in general what worked and what didn't work for you and your group in this activity

5. A group portfolio consisting of the materials prepared by your group during the group class activities:

• _____Virtue Chart (Responsibility)

• _____Gray Matters Solution Evaluation Matrix
• _____Rights Chart: Free & Informed Consent
• _____Group Code of Ethics

Structure of Written Analysis

1. A brief summary of the case focusing on the ethically relevant facts.

2. A Socio-Technical System Table + Short paragraph on each of the seven categories.
3. A Value Table + a short paragraph on the embedded values you have identied and where they occur in
the STS. Then state whether you have found any value mismatches, magnied existing value conicts,
and remote/harmful consequences.
4. On the basis of your STS analysis and value conict analysis, provide a short, concise problem state-
ment. Make sure your the problem you have identied is grounded in your STS and value analysis. If
not, one or the other (or both) needs to be changed.
5. A brainstorm list in which you record the solutions your group has designed to solve the problem
stated above. The rough unrened list should include around 10 solutions. Then rene this list into
three. Spend time detailing how you reached your rened list. Did you synthesize rough solutions? On
what basis did you leave a solution out all together? Did you nd other ways of relating or combining
solutions? Spend time documenting your brainstorming and rening process. Show in detail how you
came up with the rened list.

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100 CHAPTER 4. ENGINEERING ETHICS BOWL

6. Do a comparative evaluation of three of the rened solutions you developed in the previous step. First,
prepare a solution evaluation matrix that summarizes your comparative evaluation. Use the table
provided below. Second, provide a verbal account of the solution evaluation and comparison process
you present in the solution evaluation matrix.
7. Reach a nal decision. Defend your decision using the ethics and feasibility tests. If the decision
situation in which you are working is a dynamic one, then proppose a series of solutions that you will
pursue simultaneously, including how you would respond to contingencies that might arise. (You could
express this in the form of a decision tree.)
8. Fill out a Feasibility Matrix. See matrix below
9. Present an implementation plan based on your Feasibility Matrix. This plan should list the obstacles
that might arise and how you plan to overcome them. (For example, don't just say, "Blow the whistle."
Discuss when, how, where, to whom, and in what manner. How would you deal with reprisals? Would
your action seriously disrupt internal relations of trust and loyalty? How would you deal with this?)
Work out a detailed plan to implement your decision using the feasibility constraints to "suggest"
obstacles and impedements.
10. Finally, discuss preventive measures you can take to prevent this type of problem from arising again
in the future.

Socio-Technical System Table

Hardware Software Physical People, Procedures Laws, Data and

Surround- Groups, Statutes, Data Struc-
ings Roles Regulations tures

Table 4.3

STS Value Table

Hardware Software Physical People, Procedures Laws Data

Surround- Groups, and Data
ings Roles Structures
Integrity
Justice
Respect
Responsibility
for Safety
Free
Speech
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 101

Privacy
Property

Table 4.4

Solution Evaluation Matrix

Solution/Test Reversibility Harms/Benecence

Virtue Value Code Global Fea-
or Rights or Net Util- sibility
ity
Description Is the Does the Does the Moral val- Does the What are
solution solution solution ues realized? solution the resource,
reversible produce the express and Moral values violate technical,
with stake- best ben- integrate frustrated? any code and interest
holders? et/harm key virtues? Value con- provisions? constraints
Does it ratio? Does icts re- that could
honor basic the solution solved or impede
rights? maximize exacer- implementa-
utility? bated? tion?
Best solu-
tion
Best al-
ternate
solution
Worst solu-
tion

Table 4.5

Feasibility Matrix
Resource Constraints Technical Con- Interest Constraints
straints
Time Cost Available Applicable Manufactur-Per-son- Organiza- Legal Social,
mate- technol- ability alities tional Political,
rials, ogy Cultural
labor,
etc

Table 4.6

4.3.4 Format
1. Group, team-written projects are to be 10-20 pages in length, double spaced, with standard 1-inch
margins, and typewritten. This does not include documentation, appendices, and other notes.
2. It is essential that you carefully and fully document the resources that you have consulted. The most
direct way to do this is to include numbered entries in a concluding section entitled, "Works Cited". These
entries should provide complete bibliographical information according to standard form (Chicago Manual of
Style or the MLA Manual of Style). Then insert the number of the entry in parenthesis in the text next to

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102 CHAPTER 4. ENGINEERING ETHICS BOWL

the passage that is based on it. (Example: "The self is a relation that relates itself to its own self. . .." (4)
The number "4" refers to the forth item in the "Works Cited" section at the end of your paper.)
3. Practical norm 5j of the CIAPR code of ethics sets forth the obligation of the professional engineer to
give others due credit for their work. For this reason, plagiarism will not be tolerated in any form. Possible
forms of plagiarism include but are not limited to the following:

• Quoting directly from other sources without documenting (footnote or bibliography) and/or without
using quotation marks. Claiming that this is an appendix will not excuse this action. Claiming
ignorance will not excuse this action.
• Using the ideas or work of others without giving due credit or proper acknowledgment. "Proper ac-
knowledgment, in this context, requires a standard bibliographical reference and the use of quotation
marks if the material is being directly quoted.
• If your paper relies exclusively or primarily on extensively quoted materials or materials closely para-
phrased from the work of others, then it will not be credited as your work even if you document it. To
make it your own, you have to summarize it in your own words, analyze it, justify it, or criticize it.
• You will not be credited for material that you translate from English to Spanish unless you add to it
something substantial of your own.
• In general, what you appropriate from another source must be properly digested, analyzed, and ex-
pressed in your own words. If you have any questions on this, please ask me.
• Any plagiarized documentone which violates the above ruleswill be given a zero. You will be given
a chance to make this up, and the grade on the make-up project will be averaged in with the zero given
to the plagiarized document. Since this is a group grade, everyone in the group will be treated the
same, even though the plagiarizer may be only one person. Each member of the group is responsible
to assure that other members do not plagiarize in the name of the group. (Since the due date for
the written project is late in the semester, this will probably require that I give the entire group, i.e.,
all members, an Incomplete.) Each member of the group will be held individually responsible in the
above-described manner for the nal content of the written report.

4. This is not a research project but an exercise in integrating ethics into real world cases. In Chapters
2 and 3 of Engineering Ethics: Concepts and Cases, the authors present a thorough discussion of the case
study analysis/problem solving method discussed in class. You also have supporting handouts in your le
folders from Magic Copy Center as well as materials I have presented directly in class. Engineering Ethics:
Concepts and Cases also contains several sample case studies that can help guide you in constructing your
own presentation. What I am looking for is a discussion of the case in terms of the ethical approaches and
decision-making frameworks we have discussed this semester. You do not need to "wow" me with research
into other areas peripherally related to the case; you need to show me that you have practiced decision-making
and made a serious eort to integrate ethical considerations into the practice of engineering.
5. The usual criteria concerning formal presentations apply when competing in the Ethics Bowl. Dress
professionally.
6. You may write your group, team-written project in either Spanish or English.
7. All competitions will take place in the regular classroom.

4.3.5 Media Files Beginning Spring 2007

These media les provide information on the ethics bowl and the follow-up activities including individual
decision point summaries, in-depth case analysis, and group self-evaluation. They have been integrated into
the Business Ethics course during the Spring semester, 2008 and will apply from this date on into the future.

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 103

Team Member Evaluation Form

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<TEAM MEMBER RATING SHEET.doc>

Figure 4.8: This le contains the team member rating sheet which each group member must ll out
and turn in with his or her group project.

Final Project and Group Self-Evaluation Rubrics

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<Be_Rubric_S07.doc>

Figure 4.9: This rubric will be used to grade the in-depth case analysis, the group self-evaluation, and
the Ethics Bowl case summaries.

Basic Moral Concepts for Ethics Bowl

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<BME_V2_97.doc>

Figure 4.10: Clicking on this gure will download the basic moral concepts that you will be integrating
into the ethics bowl and your nal in-depth case analysis. You will be asked to show how you worked to
integrate these concepts in your group self-evaluation.

Intermediate Moral Concepts for Ethics Bowl

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<IMC_V2_97.doc>

Figure 4.11: Clicking on this future will open a table that summarizes the intermediate moral concepts
that are at play in the four cases that are being used in the Ethics Bowl: Hughes, Therac, Toysmart,
and Biomatrix.

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104 CHAPTER 4. ENGINEERING ETHICS BOWL

Ethics Bowl Cases for ADMI 4016: Environment of the Organization

[Media Object]4

4.3.6 Check List

Breakdown of Project Grade:
Group Team-Written Project: 200 points, group grade.

• This is your group's in-depth case analysis

• It will analyze the decision scenario your group presented on in the ethics bowl
• Your task is to give a full and comprehensive analysis of a decision point using the tables presented
above, accompanying verbal descriptions, and carrying out the four-stage problem-solving framework of
specifying the problem, generating solutions, testing solutions in terms of their ethics, and implementing
these solutions.

Nota Bene

• After the Ethics Bowl, I will provide the class with general feedback and presentations on how to
prepare the nal project. When you submit your nal report, I will be looking for how you responded
to my comments and suggestions and to the comments and suggestions of the judges and the class.
• Attendance is mandatory for all Ethics Bowl competitions. This is important because you will help
one another by the comments and discussions that are generated by the presentations. Students
not competing need to listen actively and respectfully to the presenting group. Keep in mind the
twin standards of respect and professionalism. I will deduct points from the grades of groups and/or
individuals who do not listen courteously to the presentations of others or who do not attend class
during the presentation cycle.

Nota Bene:
Check List

• Each group will turn in this checklist, fully lled out and signed. Checking signies that
your group has completed and turned in the item checked. Failure to submit this form
will cost your group 20 points
• ____ One page summaries of the 10 Ethics Bowl decision points taken from the Therac-25, Biomatrix,
Toysmart, and Hughes cases.
• ____ Group, in-depth analysis of the case your team presented on in the Ethics Bowl.
• ____ List of Ethically Relevant Facts
• ____ Socio-Technical System Table + Verbal Explanation
• ____ Value Table + Problem Statement + Justication
• ____ List of Brainstormed Solutions + Descriptin of Rening Process + Rened list
• ____ Solution Evaluation Matrix + Verbal Comparison of Three Alternatives from rened solution
list
• ____ Chosen Solution + Verbal Justication
• ____ Feasibility Matrix + Solution Implementation Plan concretely described and based on feasibility
matrix
• ____ Preventive Measures (if applicable)

Materials Required from Ethics Bowl

• _____Ethics Bowl Score Sheets

• _____The decision point your team presented on in the competition
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 105

• _____The decision point your team commented on in the competition

____ Group Self-Evaluation Form including...

• ____ a list of the goals your group set for itself

• ____ a carefully prepared, justied, and documented assessment of your group's success in reaching
these goals
• ____ a careful assessment of what you did and did not learn in this activity
• ____ a discussion of obstacles you encountered and the measures your group took to overcome these
• ____ a discussion of member participation and contribution including the member contriution forms
• ____ a general discussion of what worked and what did not work for you and your group in this
activity

_____Each member will turn in a lled out Team Member Evaluation Form. This form can be accessed
through the media le listed above. It is suggested that you do this anonomously by turning in your Team
Member Evaluation Form in a sealed envelop with the rest of these materials. You are to evaluate yourself
along with your teammates on the criteria mentioned in the form. Use the scale suggested in the form.
Group Portfolios Include...

• _____Virtue Tables including the moral exemplar prole your group prepared and presented.
• _____The justication using the rights framework of the right assigned to your group. This was one
of the rights asserted by engineers against their corporate employers.
• _____A one page summary of how you developed your role in the Incident at Morales "Vista
Publica."
• _____The code or statement of values summary prepared by your group as a part of the Pirate
Code of Ethics module. This summary focused on one of six organizations: East Texas Cancer Center,
Biomatrix, Toysmart, Hughes Aircraft, CIAPR, or AECL (in the Therac case).

Copy-paste this checklist, examine the assembled materials prepared by your group, and check the items
your group has completed. Then read, copy-paste, and sign the following pledge.
Group Pledge

• I certify that these materials have been prepared by those who have signed below, and
no one else. I certify that the above items have been checked and that those items with
checkmarks indicate materials that we have turned in. I also certify that we have not
plagiarized any material but have given due acknowledgment to all sources used. All who
sign below and whose names are included on the title page of this report have participated
fully in the preparation of this project and are equally and fully responsible for its results.
• Member signature here __________________________
• Member signature here __________________________
• Member signature here __________________________
• Member signature here __________________________
• Member signature here __________________________
• Member signature here __________________________

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106 CHAPTER 4. ENGINEERING ETHICS BOWL

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Chapter 5

Assessment and Logistics

1
5.1 Rubrics for Exams and Group Projects in Ethics

5.1.1 Key to Links

• The rst link connects to the Ethics Bowl assignment for engineering and business students. It corre-
sponds with the Ethics Bowl rubric displayed below.
• The second link connects to the module on developing reports on computing socio-technical systems.
It outlines an assignment where computing students carry out an analysis of the impact of a computing
system on a given socio-technical system. A rubric to this activity used in computer ethics classes is
provided below.
• The third link to the Three Frameworks module corresponds to a rubric below that examines how well
students deploy the frameworks on decision-making and problem-solving outlined by this module.
• The nal link to Computing Cases provides the reader with access to Chuck Hu's helpful advice on
how to write and use rubrics in the context of teaching computer ethics.

5.1.2 Introduction
This module provides a range of assessment rubrics used in classes on engineering and computer ethics.
Rubrics will help you understand the standards that will be used to assess your writing in essay exams and
group projects. They also help your instructor stay focused on the same set of standards when assessing the
work of the class. Each rubric describes what counts as exceptional writing, writing that meets expectations,
and writing that falls short of expectations in a series of explicit ways. The midterm rubrics break this
down for each question. The nal project rubrics describe the major parts of the assignment and then break
down each part according to exceptional, adequate, and less than adequate. These rubrics will help you to
understand what is expected of you as you carry out the assignment, provide a useful study guide for the
activity, and familiarize you with how your instructor has assessed your work.

5.1.3 Course Syllabi

Syllabus for Environments of the Organization
[Media Object] 2

1 This
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107
108 CHAPTER 5. ASSESSMENT AND LOGISTICS

Syllabus for Business, Society, and Government

[Media Object] 3

Business Ethics Course Syllabus

This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at

<Business Ethics Spring 2007.doc>

Figure 5.1: Course Requirements, Timeline, and Links

Business Ethics Syllabus, Spring 2008

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<Syllabus_S08_W97.doc>

Figure 5.2: This gure contains the course syllabus for business ethics for spring semester 2008.

Business Ethics Syllabus Presentation

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<BE_Intro_F07.ppt>

Figure 5.3: Clicking on this gure will open the presentation given on the rst day of class in Business
Ethics, Fall 2007. It summarizes the course objectives, grading events, and also provides a PowerPoint
slide of the College of Business Administration's Statement of Values.

5.1.4 Rubrics Used in Connexions Modules Published by Author

Ethical Theory Rubric
This rst rubric assesses essays that seek to integrate ethical theory into problem solving. It looks at a rights
based approach consistent with deontology, a consequentialist approach consistent with utilitarianism, and
virtue ethics. The overall context is a question presenting a decision scenario followed by possible solutions.
The point of the essay is to evaluate a solution in terms of a given ethical theory.
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 109

Ethical Theory Integration Rubric

This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at

<EE_Midterm_S05_Rubric.doc>

Figure 5.4: This rubric breaks down the assessment of an essay designed to integrate the ethical theories
of deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue into a decision-making scenario.

Decision-Making / Problem-Solving Rubric

This next rubric assess essays that integrate ethical considerations into decision making by means of three
tests, reversibility, harm/benecence, and public identication. The tests can be used as guides in designing
ethical solutions or they can be used to evaluate decision alternatives to the problem raised in an ethics case
or scenario. Each theory partially encapsulates an ethical approach: reversibility encapsulates deontology,
harm/benecence utilitarianism, and public identication virtue ethics. The rubric provides students with
pitfalls associated with using each test and also assesses their set up of the test, i.e., how well they build a
context for analysis.

Integrating Ethics into Decision-Making through Ethics Tests

This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at

<CE_Rubric_S06.doc>

Figure 5.5: Attached is a rubric in MSWord that assesses essays that seek to integrate ethical consid-
erations into decision-making by means of the ethics tests of reversibility, harm/benecence, and public
identication.

Ethics Bowl Follow-Up Exercise Rubric

Student teams in Engineering Ethics at UPRM compete in two Ethics Bowls where they are required to
make a decision or defend an ethical stance evoked by a case study. Following the Ethics Bowl, each group is
responsible for preparing an in-depth case analysis on one of the two cases they debated in the competition.
The following rubric identies ten components of this assignment, assigns points to each, and provides
feedback on what is less than adequate, adequate, and exceptional. This rubric has been used for several
years to evaluate these group projects

In-Depth Case Analysis Rubric

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Figure 5.6: This rubric will be used to assess a nal, group written, in-depth case analysis. It includes
the three frameworks referenced in the supplemental link provided above.

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110 CHAPTER 5. ASSESSMENT AND LOGISTICS

Rubric for Good Computing / Social Impact Statements Reports

This rubric provides assessment criteria for the Good Computing Report activity that is based on the Social
Impact Statement Analysis described by Chuck Hu at www.computingcases.org. (See link) Students take a
major computing system, construct the socio-technical system which forms its context, and look for potential
problems that stem from value mismatches between the computing system and its surrounding socio-technical
context. The rubric characterizes less than adequate, adequate, and exceptional student Good Computing
Reports.

Good Computing Report Rubric

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<CE_FinalRubric_S06.doc>

Figure 5.7: This gure provides the rubric used to assess Good Computing Reports in Computer Ethics
classes.

Computing Cases provides a description of a Social Impact Statement report that is closely related to the
Good Computing Report. Value material can be accessed by looking at the components of a Socio-Technical
System and how to construct a Socio-Technical System Analysis.4

Business Ethics Midterm Rubric Spring 2008

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<Midterm Rubric Spring 2008.doc>

Figure 5.8: Clicking on this link will open the rubric for the business ethics midterm exam for spring
2008.

5.1.5
Insert paragraph text here.

5.1.6 Study Materials for Business Ethics

This section provides models for those who would nd the Jeopardy game format useful for helping students
learn concepts in business ethics and the environments of the organization. It incorporates material from
modules in the Business Course and from Business Ethics and Society, a textbook written by Anne Lawrence
and James Weber and published by McGraw-Hill. Thanks to elainetzgerald.com for the Jeopardy template.
Jeopardy: Business Concepts and Frameworks
[Media Object]5

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 111

[Media Object]6
Privacy, Property, Free Speech, Responsibility
[Media Object] 7
Jeopardy for EO Second Exam
[Media Object]8
Jeopardy 5
[Media Object]9
Jeopardy 6
[Media Object]10
Jeopardy7
[Media Object]11
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5.2 Realizing Responsibility Through Class Participation

5.2.1 Module Introduction

Class attendance is a normal part of every college course. In the past, attendance was left up to the individual
student. Now universities, adopting the responsibility of being local parents, require that teachers monitor
class attendance closely by taking attendance each class and reporting students who are chronically absent.
This makes use of what are termed "compliance systems": minimum standards of acceptable attendance are
established and communicated to students, behavior is regularly monitored, and non-compliance is punished.
In compliance approaches, the focus is placed on maintaining the minimum level of behavior necessary to
avoid punishment. But this leaves unmentioned higher levels and standards of conduct. Students who miss
more than X number of classes are punished by having points subtracted from their overall grade. But
what constitutes outstanding attendance or, more positively, excellent participation? This module uses class
attendance as an occasion to teach the dierent concepts of moral responsibility. After outlining blame
responsibility and excuse-making, it explores responsibility as a virtue or excellence. Being absent creates its
own responsibilities (1) to the teacher (you are responsible for nding out the material covered and learning
it on your own), (2) to your classmates (what did your class group do in your absence and how will you
reintegrate yourself into the group as an equal participant), and (3) to yourself (what habits will you change
to improve your participation in class).

5.2.2 Where excuses come from

Understanding Morally Legitimate Excuses

• The table below lists characteristics of what ethicists call "capacity responsibility." These conditions
presented by F.H. Bradleydescribe when we can associate an agent with an action for the purposes
of moral evaluation. They consist of (1) self-sameness, (2) moral sense, and (3) ownership.
6 This media object is a downloadable le. Please view or download it at
<Jeopardy2.pptx>
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<Jeopardy_3.pptx>
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<Jeopardy4a.pptx>
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<Jeopardy5.pptx>
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<Jeopardy6.pptx>
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<Jeopardy7.pptx>
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112 CHAPTER 5. ASSESSMENT AND LOGISTICS

• Self-sameness bases responsibility on the ability to maintain an identity over time; you must be the
same person at the moment of accountability that you were when you performed the action. You
cannot be blamed for actions performed by somebody else. So Jorge cannot be blamed for classes
missed by Jose. Your professor should be held responsible for taking accurate attendance and not
marking you absent when you are actually in class.
• The moral sense condition requires that you have the capacity to appreciate and comply with moral
directives. This includes certain perceptual sensitivities (the ability to recognize elements of a situ-
ation that are morally relevant), emotional responses (that you respond to moral elements with the
appropriate emotion), and the ability to shape action in accordance with moral standards. Those who
lack moral sense, whether temporarily as with children or because of psychological limitations as with
psychopaths are non-responsible rather than guilty or innocent. They simply lack the general capacity
to be held accountable.
• Ownership gets down to the specics of a given situation. Did factors in the situation compel you
to miss class? Did you miss class because you lacked certain crucial bits of knowledge? Why were
you unable to attend class and can this "why" be translated into a morally legitimate excuse. In
excusing an action, you "disown" it. There are three ways to do this: a) by showing unavoidable
and conicting obligations, b) by pointing to compelling circumstances, or c) by citing
excusable ignorance.
• Formally dened, compulsion is the production in an individual of a state of mind or body against
the actual will. Sickness is a state of mind and body that could compel you to stay at home even
though you want to come to class and take the test. Having a at tire on the way to school could also
produce a state of body (being stuck at the side of the road) against actual will (driving to class in
order to take the test). With compulsion, the key test is whether the compelling circumstances were
under your control. Did your tire go at because you postponed getting a new set of tires, even when
it was clear that you needed them? Are you sick and in bed now because you overdid it at the party
last night? If the compelling circumstances resulted from actions that you performed voluntarily in
the past, then you are still responsible.
• You also need to have the knowledge necessary to act responsibly in a given situation. Imagine that
your class was being taught by a professor who claimed to be a CIA agent. He would repeatedly change
the times and locations of class meetings at the last minute to keep from being discovered by enemy
spies. Not knowing where (or when) the next class would be held would make it impossible to attend.
Here you would get o the hook for missing class because of excusable ignorance. But suppose changes
in class schedule were announced during class by the professor, but you were absent on that day. You
are now responsible for your ignorance because you should have found out what was covered while you
were absent in the past. In other words, your ignorance in the present was caused by your neglecting
to nd things out in the past. You are responsible because voluntary actions in the past (and inaction)
caused the state of ignorance in the present.
• The table below provides sample excuses given by students for absences. These are correlated with
conditions of capacity responsibility such as ignorance and compulsion. Correlating excuses with
conditions of imputability is one thing. Validating them is something else, and none of these excuses
have been validated.
• Here are some more typical excuses oered by students for missing class. Try correlating them with
the conditions of imputability to which they tacitly appeal: (1) I missed your class because I needed
the time for studying for a test in another class. (2) I missed class because the electricity went out
during the night and my electric alarm clock didn't go o on time. (3) I planned on going to class but
got called into work at the last minute by my boss. In all these cases, you have missed class and have
a reason. Can your reason be correlated with ignorance or compulsion? Were you negligent, careless,
or reckless in allowing these conditions of ignorance and compulsion to develop?
• Excuses (and blame) emerge out of a nuanced process of negotiation. Much depends on trust. Your
professor might excuse you for missing a class at the end of the semester if your attendance up to that
point had been exemplary. He could, on this basis, treat the absence as an exception to an otherwise

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 113

exemplary pattern of attendance and participation.

• But you may have trouble getting o the hook this time, if there have been several previous absences,
because the new absence falls into a pattern of poor participation accompanied by lame excuses.
Excuse negotiation (and blame responsibility) occur over the background of other values such as trust
and honesty.

Retroactive Responsibility Table

Retroactive Responsibility Excuse Excuse Statement (Some Ex-

amples)

1. Conicts within a role respon- I have a special project due in an-

sibility and between dierent role other class and nishing it con-
responsibilities. icts with attending your class.
2. Overly determining situational I am interviewing for a position
constraints: conicting interests. after I graduate, and I must be
o the island for a few days.
3. Overly determining situational My car had a at tire. My
constraints: resource constraints babysitter couldn't come so I had
to stay home with my child. My
alarm clock didn't go o because
of a power outage.
4. Knowledge limitations Class was rescheduled, and I was
unaware of the change.
5. Knowledge limitations I didn't know the assignment for
class so I came unprepared. (Not
an excuse for missing class)

Table 5.1 : Correlation of condition of imputabiloity with common excuses.

Exercise 1: Provide a Morally Justiable Excuse for Missing Class

• Oer an honest and responsible ethical assessment of the reason you were unable to carry out your
role responsibility for coming to class. Note that the default here is attending class and any departure
from the default (i.e., missing class) requires a moral justication.
• Begin by examining whether your action can be classied as an excuse arising out of compulsion or
ignorance.
• Your absence may not be morally excusable. In this case, you cannot excuse your absence but still
must explain it.
• Remember that, following Aristotle, you must show that your action was done under and because of
compulsion or under and because of ignorance. In other words, you must show that it did not arise
from past negligence or recklessness.

5.2.3 Proactive/Prospective Responsibility

Principle of Responsive Adjustment

• Responsibility for both good and bad things often emerges as a pattern exhibited by a series of action.
If you miss one class after establishing a pattern of good attendance and active participation, then
your teacher will look for something exceptional that prevented you from doing what you habitually
do. But if one absence falls into a series with other absences, then this reveals a pattern and your
teacher begins to classify you as someone who is chronically absent.

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114 CHAPTER 5. ASSESSMENT AND LOGISTICS

• So, it is not enough to oer a moral excuse to get "o the hook" for your absence. Expressing remorse,
guilt, and regret do not substitute for taking active measures to avoid repeating the wrongful act.
These changes or responsive adjustments clue others in to whether you have learned from your past
mistakes. What happened in the past was bad and you regret it; but are you willing to make the
necessary changes in your future conduct to avoid repetition of the bad act?
• This is expressed by the "Principle of Responsive Adjustment" (or PRA). Stated negatively,
failure to take measures to prevent past excusable wrongs from reoccurring in the future leads to a
reevaluation of these past actions. Failure to responsively adjust shows that the past action belongs
to context of similar bad actions indicating a bad habit or bad character. This, in turn, leads to a
reevaluation of the past act; what when taken in isolation was not blameworthy becomes blameworthy
when inserted into this broader context. Showing an unwillingness to learn from the past betrays
entrenched attitudes of negligence, carelessness, or recklessness. (See Peter A. French, Corporate
and Collective Responsibility)

Responsibility as a Virtue

• Responsibility can be recongured as a virtue or excellence.

• The table below describes the characteristics of a preventive stance where we begin by identifying
potential wrongs and harms. Once we identify these then we take serious measures to prevent them
from occurring.
• Finally, responsibility as a virtue opens up the horizon of the exemplary. Pursuing excellence requires
our identifying opportunities to go beyond preventing harm to realizing value.
• In this context, class attendance becomes class participation. As was said in the introduction, missing
a class creates a series of new tasks that arise out of your commitment to excellence in participation.
These include the following:
• 1. What was covered while you were absent? Or better, if you know in advance that you are going to
miss a class, what will be covered? How can you cover this material on your own? What can you do,
proactively, to stay with the class during your absence?
• 2. How will your absence impact the rest of the class (especially those in your class group), and what
can you do to minimize any harmful eects? Here you should notify your team members that you are
going to miss class and develop plans for maintaining your equal participation in the group and class
during and after your absence.
• 3. In accordance with the Principle of Responsive Adjustment, what changes are you making to avoid
absences in the future orputting it as positively as possibleto achieve a level of excellence in class
participation?
• Note how all these items focus on improvement or betterment rather than "making up." As Dewey
recognizes, the real function of moral responsibility is to take the lessons we learn from the past and
use them to improve ourselves.

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Responsibility as a Virtue or Proactive Re- Characteristic Proactive Response

sponsibility
Diuse blame avoidance Avoid trying to diuse
strategies the blame for missing
class on some other per-
son or situation. For ex-
ample, I couldn't come
to class because I had
a project due in an-
other class is not a
morally legitimate ex-
cuse because it places
the blame on the other
class. You have not
taken responsibility for
your absence.
Design responsibili- If you fail to partici-
ties with overlapping pate in a group activ-
domains ity, describe the group's
Plan B, i.e., how they
worked around your ab-
sence.
Extend the scope and Describe how you found
depth of knowledge. out what was covered in
class and document how
you have learned this
material
Extend power and con- Describe the measures
trol you have taken to elim-
inate the responsibility
gap between you and
your work group. For
example, how did you
make up for not par-
ticipating in the activ-
ity held in the class you
missed.
Adopt a proactive prob- Describe what measures
lem solving/preventive you have taken to avoid
approach for the future missing classes in the fu-
ture.

Table 5.2

Guidelines for Avoiding Absences

1. Build redundancy into your schedule. Many students develop schedules that are "tightly-coupled."
This means that failures or breakdowns cannot be isolated; then tend to ow over into other areas
producing a cascading disaster. A co-worker calls in sick, and your boss calls you in during the time
you have a class. You miss one class and fail to study for another. (The time you set aside for study has
been taken up by this unexpected job demand.) You have been working so hard to catch up that you

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116 CHAPTER 5. ASSESSMENT AND LOGISTICS

catch a cold. Now everything becomes that much harder because you are not working to full capacity.
The lesson here is to set up your schedule from the beginning with a certain amount of exibility built
in. This could be as simple as taking four instead of ve classes or working 10 instead of 20 hours per
week.
2. Look for incentives or motives to come to class. One important incentive is that you may get a better
grade. Teachers tend to know students who come to class better; they consider them more responsible
and more committed.
3. Get proactive when you return. Instead of asking the professor, "Did we do anything important while
I was absent?" consult the syllabus and a classmate to nd out what you missed. Then check your
understanding with the professor. "My understanding is that you discussed moral responsibility with
the class and applied the framework to a case. Is this correct?" Instead of asking the professor, "What
should I do to make up for what I missed?" come with your own plan. Show that you have taken
responsibility for your absence by getting proactive and planning the future around realizing value.
4. Absences have an impact on your fellow students as much as on you or your instructor. If you are
working in groups, nd out from your peers what was covered. If your group is depending on your
completing a task for the class you are missing, try to develop a "work-around." ("I won't be in class
tomorrow but I am sending you my part of the group assignment via email attachment.") Let your
team know what is happening with you and make sure that you keep up on all your commitment and
responsibilities to the group.

Exercise 2: Getting Proactive about your absence

• Develop a plan for "getting back into the loop." What are you going to do to cover the material and
activities you have missed?
• Get Preventive. Describe what you are going to do now to avoid absences in the future.
• Shoot for the ideal. What can you doabove and beyond class attendanceto realize exemplary partic-
ipation in your ethics class.

5.2.4 Conclusion
Exercise #3: Getting and Staying Honest

• Below is a template that you need to duplicate, ll out, and place in the class attendance le that will
be on the desk in front of class.
• Duplicate and sign the honesty pledge at the end of this module.
• Students often wish to provide evidence documenting their claims regarding their absences. You may
do this, but remember that this is neither required nor in the spirit of prospective responsibility.
• Furthermore, be aware that you are not to provide condential information such as personal health
information or student id numbers or social security numbers. Health issues are to be referred to
generically by saying something like, I was unable to come to class Tuesday because of health reasons.

1. Class Missed (Day of week and date):

2. Material covered during class:
3. Reason for missing class (please do not provide condential information):
4. Action Plan for Absence: How you intend to take responsibility for the material covered while you were
absent; How you intend to make reparations to your group for not participating in group learning activities
for the class you missed;
5. How do you plan to avoid absences in the future:
Honesty Pledge

• To realize the value of honesty, you will make the following armation:

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 117

• The information I have provided above is truthful, the excuses I have ennumerated rig-
orously examined from a moral point of view, and the responsive commitments I have
made above are serious, and I will take active and realistic eorts to carry them out.

Signature:_____________________________________________

5.2.5 Bibliography
1. Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics, Book 3, Chapters 1-3.
2. Bradley, F. H. (1927/1963). Essay I: The vulgar notion of responsibility in connexion withe
theories of free-will and necessity. Ethical Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3-4.
3. Davis, M. (1998) Thinking Like an Engineer: Studies in the Ethics of a Profession. Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press: 119-156.
4. Fingarette, H. (1971) Criminal Insanity. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA: 171.
5. French, P.A. (1984) Collective and Corporate Responsibility. Columbia University Press: New
York, NY.
6. Jackall, R. (1988) Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
7. Ladd, J. (1991) Bhopal: An essay on moral responsibility and civic virtue. Journal of Social Phi-
losophy, 32(1).
8. May, L. (1987) The Morality of Groups: Collective Responsibility, Group-Based Harm, and
Corporate Rights. University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, IN.
9. May, L. (1994) The Socially Responsive Self: Social Theory and Professional Ethics. Uni-
versity of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL.
10. Pritchard, M. (1996) Reasonable Children: Moral Education and Moral Learning. University
of Kansas Press, Lawrence, KS.
11. Pritchard, M. (1998) "Professional responsibility: focusing on the exemplary", Science and Engi-
neering Ethics, Vol 4, pp 215-234.
12. Pritchard, M. (2006) Professional Integrity: Thinking Ethically. University of Kansas Press,
Lawrence, KS.
13. Stone, C. D. (1975) Where the Law Ends: The Social Control of Corporate Behavior.
Prospector Heights, IL: Waveland Press, INC.

13
5.3 Computer and Engineering Ethics Muddiest Point Module

Muddiest Point Module

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118 INDEX

Index of Keywords and Terms

Keywords are listed by the section with that keyword (page numbers are in parentheses). Keywords
do not necessarily appear in the text of the page. They are merely associated with that section. Ex.
apples, Ÿ 1.1 (1) Terms are referenced by the page they appear on. Ex. apples, 1

A Academic Integrity, Ÿ 5.2(111) Ÿ 5.3(117)

Assessment, Ÿ 5.1(107), Ÿ 5.3(117) Ethics Bowl, Ÿ 2.2(33), Ÿ 4.1(91), Ÿ 4.2(92),
Ÿ 4.3(97)
B Business, Ÿ 2.3(45), Ÿ 4.2(92) Ethics Case Analysis, Ÿ 4.3(97)
Business Ethics, Ÿ 2.3(45) Ethics in Decision-Making, Ÿ 4.3(97)
C Cases, Ÿ 2.4(63)
Exams, Ÿ 5.1(107)
Class Attendance, Ÿ 5.2(111) G Group Projects, Ÿ 5.1(107)
Code of Ethics, Ÿ 3.1(83)
Codes of Ethics, Ÿ 2.1(25) H Honesty, Ÿ 5.2(111)
Collaborative Learning, Ÿ 1.2(5) Humanities, Ÿ 4.3(97)
Computer, Ÿ 2.5(65), Ÿ 5.3(117)
Computer Ethics, Ÿ 1.1(1), Ÿ 2.1(25), Ÿ 2.2(33) M Moral Exemplars, Ÿ 1.3(13)
Moral Psychology, Ÿ 1.3(13)
D Debating, Ÿ 4.2(92) muddiest point, Ÿ 5.3(117)
Debating cases and scenarios in ethics,
Ÿ 4.1(91) P Pirate Creed or Code, Ÿ 3.1(83)
Decision, Ÿ 2.4(63), Ÿ 2.5(65) Professional Ethics, Ÿ 1.4(18)
Decision Making, Ÿ 2.2(33)
Duties, Ÿ 2.1(25)
R Responsibility, Ÿ 5.2(111)
Rights, Ÿ 2.1(25)
E EAC, Ÿ 2.4(63) Rubric, Ÿ 5.1(107)
Engineering, Ÿ 2.3(45), Ÿ 2.4(63), Ÿ 3.1(83),
Ÿ 5.3(117)
S Social Impacts, Ÿ 2.3(45)
Socio-technical analysis, Ÿ 2.2(33)
Engineering Ethics, Ÿ 1.1(1), Ÿ 2.1(25),
Socio-Technical System, Ÿ 2.3(45)
Ÿ 2.2(33), Ÿ 4.1(91), Ÿ 4.3(97)
Statement of Value, Ÿ 5.2(111)
Ethical Decision-Making, Ÿ 4.1(91)
Ethical Dilemma, Ÿ 1.1(1) T Technical Impacts, Ÿ 2.3(45)
Ethical Theory, Ÿ 1.1(1), Ÿ 1.4(18)
Ethical Values, Ÿ 1.2(5) V Value, Ÿ 5.2(111)
Ethics, Ÿ 1.1(1), Ÿ 1.2(5), Ÿ 1.3(13), Ÿ 2.1(25), Virtue Ethics, Ÿ 1.3(13), Ÿ 1.4(18)
Ÿ 2.2(33), Ÿ 2.3(45), Ÿ 2.4(63), Ÿ 2.5(65),
Ÿ 3.1(83), Ÿ 4.2(92), Ÿ 5.1(107), Ÿ 5.2(111),
W Work Teams, Ÿ 1.2(5)

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ATTRIBUTIONS 119

Attributions

Collection: Professional Ethics in Engineering

Edited by: William Frey
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Module: "Theory Building Activities: Mountain Terrorist Exercise"
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Module: "Ethics of Teamwork"
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Module: "Theory-Building Activities: Virtue Ethics"
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Module: "Theory-Building Activities: Rights"
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Module: "Three Frameworks for Ethical Decision Making and Good Computing Reports"
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120 ATTRIBUTIONS

Module: "Socio-Technical Systems in Professional Decision Making"

By: William Frey
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Module: "Ethical Decision Making in Engineering"
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Pages: 63-65
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Module: "Gray Matters for the Hughes Aircraft Case"
By: William Frey
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License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Module: "Pirate Code for Engineering Ethics"
By: William Frey
URL: http://cnx.org/content/m13849/1.10/
Pages: 83-90
Copyright: William Frey
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Module: "Ethics Bowl Rules and Procedures"
By: William Frey
URL: http://cnx.org/content/m13817/1.4/
Pages: 91-92
Copyright: William Frey
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Module: "Ethics Bowl: Cases and Score Sheets"
By: William Frey
URL: http://cnx.org/content/m13852/1.6/
Pages: 92-97
Copyright: William Frey
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Module: "Practical and Professional Ethics Bowl Activity: Follow-Up In-Depth Case Analysis"
By: William Frey
URL: http://cnx.org/content/m13759/1.12/
Pages: 97-105
Copyright: William Frey
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Module: "Rubrics for Exams and Group Projects in Ethics"
By: William Frey
URL: http://cnx.org/content/m14059/1.17/
Pages: 107-111
Copyright: William Frey
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Available for free at Connexions <http://cnx.org/content/col10399/1.4>

ATTRIBUTIONS 121

Module: "Realizing Responsibility Through Class Participation"

By: William Frey, Jose A. Cruz-Cruz
URL: http://cnx.org/content/m13788/1.6/
Pages: 111-117
Copyright: William Frey, Jose A. Cruz-Cruz
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Module: "Computer and Engineering Ethics Muddiest Point Module"
By: William Frey
URL: http://cnx.org/content/m13853/1.2/
Page: 117
Copyright: William Frey
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Available for free at Connexions <http://cnx.org/content/col10399/1.4>

Professional Ethics in Engineering
Disclaimer: We are aware that others (not us) have made (or could make) this collection/course available
as printed or electronic (e.g., kindle) versions that are available online at a cost. The Creative Commons
Attribution Copyright agreement that covers this collection allows this. However we want to make readers
aware that they can generate their own updated version of this book/collection/course by using the download
to pdf features provided by Connexions. We still want to continue to encourage collaborators to take the
content we provide and customize it to t their own context and circumstances using, among other options,
the derived copy feature oered by Connexions. This is a preliminary version of a course in Engineering
Ethics that pulls together Connexions modules that were used as part of an Engineering Ethics course taught
by William Frey in fall 2006. An Engineering Ethics Bowl competition formed the capstone experience of
this course. Frey, Cruz, and Sanchez have reported in detail on the Engineering Ethics Bowl in "The Ethics
Bowl in Engineering Ethics at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez," in Teaching Ethics, Volume 4,
number 2, Spring 2004: 15-31. The major change in this activity reported in this course is the use of peer
review teams to score the competition. This course in Engineering Ethics is being developed as a part of an
NSF-funded project, "Collaborative Development of Ethics Across the Curriculum Resources and Sharing
of Best Practices," SES 0551779.

About Connexions
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3 AUDIOBOOK COLLECTIONS

6 BOOK COLLECTIONS